research-article

Subliminal Priming in Human-Agent Interaction: Can Agents Use Single-Frame Visuals in Video Feeds to Shape User Perceptions?

Authors:

Elaheh Sanoubari,

Denise Y. Geiskkovitch,

Diljot S. Garcha,

Shahed A. Sabab,

James E. Young,

Pourang IraniAuthors Info & Claims

HAI '18: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction

Pages 205 - 213

https://doi.org/10.1145/3284432.3284447

Published: 04 December 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We investigated interactive agents using subliminal priming - the act of exposing a person to stimuli that they may not consciously notice, but are still processed subliminally in their mind - in an attempt to shape a person's mood and behavior. We present an overview of the psychology of subliminal priming from the perspective of how it applies to human-agent interaction, including a discussion of the potential ethical and practical implications. We further present the results from two exploratory studies (one in-lab, one crowdsourced) that present potential subliminal-priming interfaces. Our results suggest that subliminal priming may impact how participants perceive an agent and how much they enjoy a task, but we failed to find any effect of priming on participant mood or agent persuasiveness. This work aims to raise awareness of the dangers of subliminal methods of priming and contributes to the discussion on the ethics of social agents.

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Cited By

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Index Terms

Subliminal Priming in Human-Agent Interaction: Can Agents Use Single-Frame Visuals in Video Feeds to Shape User Perceptions?
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Interaction design

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cover image ACM Conferences

HAI '18: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction

December 2018

402 pages

ISBN:9781450359535

DOI:10.1145/3284432

General Chairs:
Michita Imai
Keio University, Japan
,
Tim Norman
University of Southampton, UK
,
Program Chairs:
Elizabeth Sklar
King's College London, UK
,
Takanori Komatsu
Meiji University, Japan

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 December 2018

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HAI '18

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HAI '18: 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction

December 15 - 18, 2018

Southampton, United Kingdom

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HAI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 40 of 92 submissions, 43%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 121 of 404 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Nunes Vilaza GDoherty KMcCashin DCoyle DBardram JBarry M(2022)A Scoping Review of Ethics Across SIGCHIProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533511(137-154)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533511
Seaborn KFrank A(2022)What Pronouns for Pepper? A Critical Review of Gender/ing in ResearchProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501996(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3501996
Sankaran SZhang CAarts HMarkopoulos P(2021)Exploring Peoples' Perception of Autonomy and Reactance in Everyday AI InteractionsFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2021.71307412Online publication date: 29-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713074
MENG XYOSHIDA NWAN XYONEZAWA T(2021)Quantitative Effects on Multiple Involuntary Physiologic Expressions That Convey the Fear of Robotsロボットの恐怖を伝える複数の不随意な皮膚上生理表現における量的影響の検討Journal of Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics10.3156/jsoft.33.4_74233:4(742-756)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.3156/jsoft.33.4_742
Yoneda RMorita J(2021)The Internal State Mediating Between Decision-Making and ArousalProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction10.1145/3472307.3484179(75-83)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2021
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Schneeberger TAly FDon DGies KZeimer ZNunnari FGebhard P(2021)Influence of Movement Energy and Affect Priming on the Perception of Virtual Characters Extroversion and MoodCompanion Publication of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3461615.3485409(211-219)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
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