Video Analysis of Approach-Avoidance Behaviors of Teenagers Speaking with Virtual Agents
Résumé
Analysis of non-verbal behaviors in HCI allows understanding
how individuals apprehend and adapt to different situations of
interaction. This seems particularly relevant when considering
tasks such as speaking in a foreign language, which is known to
elicit anxiety. This is even truer for young users for whom
negative pedagogical feedbacks might have a strong negative
impact on their motivation to learn.
In this paper, we consider the approach-avoidance behaviors of
teenagers speaking with virtual agents when using an e-learning
platform for learning English. We designed an algorithm for
processing the video of these teenagers outside laboratory
conditions (e.g. a classical collective classroom in a secondary
school) using a webcam. This algorithm processes the video of the
user and computes the inter-ocular distance. The anxiety of the
users is also collected with questionnaires.
Results show that the inter-ocular distance enables to discriminate
between approach and avoidance behaviors of teenagers reacting
to positive or negative stimulus. This simple metric collected via
video processing enables to detect an approach behavior related to
a positive stimulus and an avoidance behavior related to a
negative stimulus. Furthermore, we observed that these
automatically detected approach-avoidance behaviors are
correlated with anxiety.