Building on recent work that emphasizes diverse bodily engagement and kinetic expression in avatar design, this study explores how abstraction can support reflection in movement-based practices. We present insights from eight expert dance practitioners who engaged with MoveCraft, a custom VR/MR prototype featuring avatars with varying levels of abstraction. Through qualitative analysis, we identify two design dimensions-standardized vs. diversified and clear vs. ambiguous-which together define four distinct reflective spaces for avatar representation. We contribute design considerations for XR platforms aimed at embodied learning, along with lessons learned on using avatar abstraction to enrich movement reflection.

How language interacts with metacognitive processes is an understudied area. Earlier research shows that people produce disfluencies (i.e., "uh" s or "um" s) in their speech when they are not sure of their answers, indicating metacognitive monitoring. Gestures have monitoring and predictive roles in language, also implicating metacognitive processes. Further, the rate of speech disfluencies and gestures change as a function of the communicational setting. People produce fewer disfluencies and more gestures when they can see the listener than when the listener is not visible. In the current study, 50 participants (32 women, Mage = 21.16, SD = 1.46) were asked 40 general knowledge questions, either with a visible (n = 25) or nonvisible (n = 25) listener. They provided feelings-of-knowing (FOK) judgment immediately after seeing the question and were asked to think aloud while pondering their answers. Then, they provided retrospective confidence judgments (RCJs). Results showed that gestures and speech disfluencies were not related either to the accuracy or the FOK judgments. However, both gestures and speech disfluencies predicted RCJs uniquely and interactively. Speech disfluencies negatively predicted RCJs. In contrast, hand gestures were positively related to RCJs. Importantly, the use of gestures was more strongly related to RCJs when disfluencies were also higher. No effect of communicational setting on the rate of gestures or speech disfluencies was found. These results highlight the importance of multimodal language cues in the elaboration of metacognitive judgments.

As part of the multimodal language system, gestures play a vital role for listeners, by capturing attention and providing information. Similarly, disfluencies serve as a cue for the listeners about one's knowledge on a topic. In two studies, the first study with natural and the second study with controlled stimuli, we asked whether the combination of gestures and speech disfluencies would affect how listeners made feeling-of-another's-knowing (FOAK) judgments regarding speakers' knowledge states. In Study 1, we showed participants videos of speakers providing navigational instruction. We manipulated the speakers' use of gestures and speech disfluencies, whereas facial expressions, words, and additional visual cues (e.g., background, clothes, objects) naturally occurred. We found that fluent speech elicited higher FOAK ratings than disfluent speech, but no significant effect was found for gestures. In the follow-up Study 2, we examined the same disfluency-gesture interaction in a more controlled setting using video stimuli with an actress controlling for background, intonation, and word choice, as well as iconic and beat gesture types as gesture subcategories. Participants also filled out the Gesture Awareness Scale. Results were identical with the first study, in which only the disfluent speech received significantly lower FOAK ratings, revealing no effects of gesture use or type. These findings suggest that individuals may use certain communicative cues more than others, particularly in the context of assessing others' knowledge.

In shared tasks carried out with a partner, people often encode information related to their partner even when it is irrelevant to them. This social encoding may be especially adaptive in fitness-relevant situations, for example, when survival is at stake. In two experiments, we asked whether this joint encoding effect would be enhanced when the joint task was survival-related. In Experiment 1, using a survival processing paradigm combined with a joint encoding task, 47 university participants imagined themselves in either a survival or a moving scenario, alone or in dyads with a confederate. The participants and confederates rated the usefulness of words from different categories for their assigned scenario. A surprise recall test showed that participants in both groups recalled more items from their partner's category than items from the unassigned category. Crucially, this joint memory effect was larger in the survival group, suggesting that participants had superior encoding of the partner's information in the survival scenario. In a second experiment, we replicated this finding with a different sample of 50 university students and a confederate. These findings point to a "social information hoarding" strategy, where participants encoded as many items from their partner's category as those of their own when in a survival-related situation. The cognitive mechanisms underpinning such a social information hoarding strategy require further investigation.

This study examined whether the metacognitive system monitors the potential positive effects of gestures on spatial thinking. Participants (N = 59, 31F, M-age = 21.67) performed a mental rotation task, consisting of 24 problems varying in difficulty, and they evaluated their confidence in their answers to problems in either gesture or control conditions. The results revealed that performance and confidence were higher in the gesture condition, in which the participants were asked to use their gestures during problem-solving, compared with the control condition, extending the literature by evidencing gestures' role in metacognition. Yet, the effect was only evident for females, who already performed worse than males, and when the problems were difficult. Encouraging gestures adversely affected performance and confidence in males. Such results suggest that gestures selectively influence cognition and metacognition and highlight the importance of task-related (i.e., difficulty) and individual-related variables (i.e., sex) in elucidating the links between gestures, confidence, and spatial thinking.

Memory systems serve an adaptive function for the fitness of organisms. A good example of this is the Survival Processing Effect (SPE) which points to increased retention of information when it is processed in a survival context compared to other contexts. Survival processing may also affect metacognitive processes, by increasing confidence judgments as well as increasing metacognitive sensitivity. No previous study, however, has directly examined whether processing information for survival also has an effect on metacognitive processes. Here we ask whether SPE extends to the metacognitive system in terms of both metacognitive sensitivity and confidence bias. In Experiment 1 participants were asked to rate a list of words in terms of relevance in a survival scenario or a moving scenario. In a surprise old/new recognition test, they were given one word at a time and asked to indicate if they have rated the presented word before and state how confident they are in that choice. Surprisingly, the results did not reveal a SPE, which may have been due to high overall performance in the recognition task. In Experiment 2 we increased the level of difficulty of the memory task, which resulted in a robust SPE, but could not find this effect in metacognitive monitoring. Together, these results suggest that survival processing may not affect metacognitive processes in a reliable fashion.

Although memory is constantly monitored and controlled by the metacognitive system, little is known about how people monitor memory conformity, incorporating information in others' memories into one's memory of a specific event. In this study, we tested participants' memory for a seemingly shared event and asked them to report their confidence in their answers both individually and jointly. We also explored the relationships between specific individual characteristics, memory, and confidence variables. We have two critical findings apart from replicating the well-evidenced memory conformity effect. First, participants were privately more confident in memory decisions when they did not conform to their cowitness than when they conformed. Conversely, they were publicly more confident in decisions when they conformed than when they did not conform. Second, participants were publicly more confident when they conformed to an incorrect than a correct answer, social outsourcing the information when uncertain. These results indicate that the metacognitive system successfully monitors the social influences on memory, tracks the reliability of information presented by another, and refers to it in context-specific ways (i.e., public vs. private).

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technologies offer new possibilities for studying embodied interaction with different sets of constraints and affordances for action-taking while using one’s physical body. In this study, we designed and prototyped a VR dance experience, Virtual Dance Mirror, where a dancer’s bodily movements are reflected on a 3D avatar model using a motion-capture suit. We investigated the novel possibilities for avatar design based on the expression of movements available for dancers in VR environment. After a preliminary briefing session, we conducted a user-study with five dancers with semi-structured interviews. Our findings support HCI literature on virtual body design to facilitate collaboration and non-verbal communication between VR users.

Wearable devices fall short in providing information other than physiological metrics despite athletes' demand for psychological feedback. To address this, we introduce a preliminary exploration to track psychological states of athletes based on commercial wearable devices, coach observations and machine learning. Our system collects Inertial Measuring Unit data from tennis players, while their coaches provide labels on their psychological states. A recurrent neural network is then trained to predict coach labels from sensor data. We test our approach by predicting being in the zone, a psychological state of optimal performance. We conduct two experimental games with two elite coaches and four professional players for evaluation. Our learned models achieve above 85% test accuracy, implying that our approach could be utilized to predict the zone at relatively low cost. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications and feasibility of this approach by contextualizing it in a real-life scenario.

Self-reflection is evaluation of one’s inferential processes often triggered by complex social and emotional experiences, characterized by their ambiguity and unpredictability, pushing one to re-interpret the experience, and update existing knowledge. Using immersive Virtual Reality (VR), we aimed to support social and emotional learning (SEL) through reflection in psychology education. We used the case of psychosis as it involves ambiguous perceptual experiences. With a codesign workshop, we designed a VR prototype that simulates the perceptual, cognitive, affective, and social elements of psychotic experiences, followed by a user-study with psychology students to evaluate the potential of this technology to support reflection. Our analyses suggested that technology-mediated reflection in SEL involves two dimensions: spontaneous perspective-taking and shared state of affect. By exploring the subjective qualities of reflection with the said dimensions, our work contributes to the literature on technology-supported learning and VR developers designing for reflection.

A key aspect of metacognition is the ability to monitor performance. A recent line of work has shown that error-monitoring ability captures both the magnitude and direction of timing errors, thereby pointing at the metric composition of error monitoring [e.g., Akdoğan and Balcı (J Exp Psychol https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000265 , 2017)]. These studies, however, primarily used a composite variable that combined isolated measures of ordinal confidence ratings (as a proxy for error magnitude judgement) and “shorter/longer than the target” judgements. In two experiments we tested temporal error monitoring (TEM) performance with a more direct measure of directional error magnitude rating on a continuum. The second aim of this study is to test if TEM performance is modulated by the feeling of being watched that was previously shown to influence metacognitive-like monitoring processes. We predicted that being watched would improve TEM performance, particularly in participants with high timing precision (a proxy for high task mastery), and disrupt TEM performance in participants with low timing precision (a proxy for low task mastery). In both experiments, we found strong evidence for TEM ability. However, we did not find any reliable effect of the social stimulus on TEM performance. In short, our results demonstrate that metric error monitoring is a robust metacognitive phenomenon, which is not sensitive to social influence.

With the rise of integration of robots in our daily lives, people find their own ways of normalizing their interaction with artificial agents, one of which is attributing mind to them. Research has shown that attributing mind to an artificial agent improves the flow of the interaction and alters behavior following it. However, little is known about the the influence of the interaction context and the outcome of the interaction. Addressing this gap in the literature, we explored the influence of theInteraction Context(cooperation vs. competition) andOutcome(win vs. lose) on the attributed levels of mind to an artificial agent. To that end, we used an interactive game that consisted of trivia questions between teams of human participants and the robot Cozmo. We found that in the cooperation condition, those who lost as a team ascribed greater levels of mind to the agent compared to those who won as a team. However, participants who competed with and won against the robot attributed greater levels of mind to the agent compared to those who cooperated and won as a team. These results suggest that people attribute mind to artificial agents in a self-serving way, depending on the interaction context and outcome.

Flow state is a psychological state of optimal performance. To experience flow state, one needs to receive unambiguous feedback. Previous studies have described activities with internalized feedback modalities (e.g. visual). However, they do not offer any appropriate feedback modality for the activities that may benefit from external feedback, such as opponent-based sports. Addressing the issue, we adopted a research through design process and considered tennis as our case, in which players can benefit from attaining flow [1]. This pictorial reveals our approach to design 6 wearable device concepts under 3 design themes as future directions for design practitioners and researchers.

Wearable devices have the potential to enhance sports performance, yet they are not fulfilling this promise. Our previous studies with 6 professional tennis coaches and 20 players indicate that this could be due the lack of psychological or mental state feedback, which the coaches claim to provide. Towards this end, we propose to detect the flow state, mental state of optimal performance, using wearables data to be later used in training. We performed a study with a professional tennis coach and two players. The coach provided labels about the players' flow state while each player had a wearable device on their racket holding wrist. We trained multiple models using the wearables data and the coach labels. Our deep neural network models achieved around 98% testing accuracy for a variety of conditions. This suggests that the flow state or what coaches recognize as flow, can be detected using wearables data in tennis which is a novel result. The implication for the HCI community is that having access to such information would allow for design of novel hardware and interaction paradigms that would be helpful in professional athlete training.

The framing effect is a heuristic bias, where the way a question is presented affects people's response to it. This study (n=924) investigated the influence of the behavioral immune system on the framing effect. We tested the changes in people's responses towards two frames (i.e., losses and gains) when presented with a threat of disease and as a function of their perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) level. After being randomly assigned to one of three priming conditions-disease threat, negative threat, and no-threat-participants were presented with one of the two-frame versions (gain or loss) of the damaged painting problem where they chose between a safe and a risky option. Finally, participants responded to the PVD scale and to demographic questions. Results revealed that when people were primed with disease threat, those with lower PVD had a higher likelihood to take risks in the gain frame and a lower likelihood in the loss frame. This effect was not observed when participants were primed with negative threat or no-threat, nor for those participants with high levels of PVD. This finding suggests a specific effect of disease threat on the framing effect.

Recent research on human robot interaction explored whether people's tendency to conform to others extends to artificial agents (Hertz & Wiese, 2016). However, little is known about to what extent perception of a robot as having a mind affects people's decisions. Grounded on the theory of mind perception, the current study proposes that artificial agents can induce decision change to the extent in which individuals perceive them as having minds. By varying the degree to which robots expressed ability to act (agency) or feel (experience), we specifically investigated the underlying mechanisms of mind attribution to robots and social influence. Our results show an interactive effect of perceived experience and perceived agency on social influence induced by artificial agents. The findings provide preliminary insights regarding autonomous robots' influence on individuals' decisions and form a basis for understanding the underlying dynamics of decision making with robots.