We conducted an experiment using two Japanese typographies and sixteen words, having positive/negative emotional valence, to investigate the effects of harmonization between a word’s meaning and typography for harmonized and ill-harmonized conditions. Four different words - two positive and two negative - were simultaneously presented at the four corners of a display. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they search a word on the display after hearing it. We analyzed the gaze duration in each region of the display (target/distractors). In the ill-harmonized condition the target was found earlier compared with the harmonized condition. However the words were finished reading at same time in both condition. The results imply that the target and distractors were processed automatically because of the increase in words’ perceptual fluency due to harmonization, thereby resulting in the delayed finding of the target.

Although many information system are employing autonomous agents for the purpose of user-friendly interface, cognitive mechanisms of their effects are not clear yet. In this study, we compared three types of UI, an embodied agent system equipped with a direct anthropomorphization robot, an only voice agent, and without agent system condition, of a microwave oven. Thirty-six older (65 years or above) and 36 younger adults (undergraduate students) participated in the usability testing experiment with one of the three agent conditions. Analysis of interaction between a participant and the oven, through participants’ utterance and the personal-space data, showed large differences between two age groups; younger adults entertained the interaction both the voice and the embodiment agent conditions, while older adults evaluated higher only with the embodiment agent condition. Differences in mental models of older- and younger adults, and reasons of those aging effects will be discussed.

When people ride an autonomous car, they might feel anxiety because they cannot know how it may move. Addingartificially augmented signals, which represent coming changes of the vehicle, it may be useful to reduce anxiety by changeexpectation. Thus we executed an experiment examining whether ascending sound could decrease passenger’s anxiety, whileriding on virtual autonomous car. In the experiment, participants saw 360-degree computer-graphics world through a head-mounted-display. The stimuli were views from a moving car with 2 speed (19 and 320 km/h), half of which was addedascending and descending sound at first / last 6 secs. Results of the heart-wave analysis as biometric index, i.e., index ofsympathetic nervous (LF/HL), showed a marginal interaction between existence of sounds and the vehicle speed; while soundsreduced participants’ anxiety with high-speed condition, they showed higher tension with sound at slow-speed conditions.