Benefits of Subliminal Feedback Loops in Human-Computer Interaction.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Volume 2011, Article ID 346492, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2011/346492 Research Article Benefits of Subliminal Feedback Loops in Human-Computer Interaction Walter Ritter User Centered Technologies Research, University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg, Hochschulstraße 1, 6850 Dornbirn, Austria Correspondence should be addressed to Walter Ritter, walter.ritter@fhv.at Received 30 April 2010; Revised 18 August 2010; Accepted 24 August 2010 Academic Editor: Kenneth Revett Copyright © 2011 Walter Ritter. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. A lot of efforts have been directed to enriching human-computer interaction to make the user experience more pleasing or efficient. In this paper, we briefly present work in the fields of subliminal perception and affective computing, before we outline a new approach to add analog communication channels to the human-computer interaction experience. In this approach, in addition to symbolic predefined mappings of input to output, a subliminal feedback loop is used that provides feedback in evolutionary subliminal steps. In two studies involving concentration-intensive games, we investigated the impact of this approach. In a first study evolutionary feedback loops adjusted the user interface of a memory game whereas in the second study the lighting of the test room was adjusted dynamically. The results show that in settings with an evolutionary feedback loop test participants were able to reach significantly higher scores compared to the static counterparts. Finally, we discuss the impact that such subliminally worki