Abstract
Technology and design have always been and will always be essential for society’s progress, development, and advancement. The Singapore University of Technology and Design is established to advance knowledge and nurture technically grounded leaders and innovators to serve societal needs, with a focus on Design, through an integrated multi-disciplinary curriculum and multi-disciplinary research. The Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) cluster is a vibrant community of research scholars and educators. and we offer learning experiences that integrate the disciplines of the humanities, arts and social sciences with SUTD’s engineering and architecture pillars. In this talk, I will share some of the interdisciplinary work that I have undertaken, including research projects that examine the design interfaces that could reduce human cognitive load on multi-robot-human interactions, design principles and cognitive impact of a dual-language semantic intervention tool for the elderly, preschoolers’ selective trust in social robots, and a mobile application that enables single-word identification of printed texts with supplementary word-learning features as an assistive tool for children to facilitate independent reading and learning.
Speaker - Yow Wei Quin
Associate Professor Yow Wei Quin is currently the Associate Head (Research) in Humanities Arts & Social Science at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and a visiting Senior Academician at the Changi General Hospital. She obtained her PhD (Psychology), MA (Psychology) and MSc (Statistics) from Stanford University, USA. Her main area of research is examining socio-cognitive development across the lifespan, including how factors such as the language environment that we grow up in influence our cognitive functioning, as well as how technology influences the way we communicate and interact with each other. Professor Yow has published more than 50 international peer-refereed papers, conference proceedings and book chapters in top-tiered journals and conferences such as Developmental Science, Child Development, Journal of Gerontology Series B, Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, Frontiers in Psychology, Cognitive Development, GSA, SRCD, Cognitive Science Society, etc., in the area of social cognition, bilingualism, technology and aging. She also currently serves in the Editorial Board for Cognitive Development, and Frontiers in Psychology, and a recipient of multiple awards, such as the Public Administration Medal (Bronze), GSA Diversity Mentoring & Career Development Fellowship, SUTD Outstanding Education Award, and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology Teacher/Scholar Award.
讲座实录
Bilingualism & Gerontechnology
Singapore is a multilingual society with four official languages, which are English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. The Chinese also includes a lot of different dialects. In this project, the team focus on the development of an age-friendly multilingual, multi-modal touch-screen platform, a game-based application on a tablet, in cognitive intervention research.
Four major modifications to encourage independent playing
Use simple and commonly-used phrases instead of formal instructions
Use a local accent instead of the standard formal accent
Use an avatar modelled after a care centre staff (familiar person+familiar name) to deliver the game
Include 4 different levels of prompt, delivered by the avatar, to cater to differing needs
After this project, they conclude some preliminary guidelines for the design of user interfaces for Healthy Cognitive(HC) and Persons with Dementia(PwD) from multilingual and low education backgrounds. In the guidelines, Prof.Yow stressed the difficulty for elderly with touch screens. So besides the design of the application, the hardware also needs to adapting the needs. Such as the screen need to be more sensitive to different touches, which requires different modal skills. [1]
Cognitive load & Multitasking
For this particular project, Prof.Yow is looking at multiple robot-human interaction(HRI). More specifically, designing and testing human-robot interfaces that improve human performance under high cognitive load situations when controlling multiple robots.
The research team created a game to simulate how to control three different robots for multi-tasks. They test different operations and interfaces to find out how cognition works on the participants. Here they use a Unified Cognitive Model and also considered individual variation in the research. The team looked at the indicator of cognitive load with three levels of difficulty of the interface to understand the effect on cognitive cost.
The result indicates that multi-modal can help to improve Touchscreen performance to match the Gamepad, especially with the insertion of speech.
Social Cognition – Trust in Social Robots
Here Prof.Yow focuses on the preschoolers who have an ability called selective learning. They tried to find out how well the preschoolers learn from human beings compared to the social robots. Many social robots are designed to support children’s exploration and learning,[2] especially for autistic children who have trouble with social intercourse. Learning from a robot is much easier for them.
From their first study, the team finds out that the children trust the human and the robot equally when they delivered accurate information. When the human was inaccurate, the child would tolerate the error and try to trust the human again. However, if the robot was inaccurate before, children would lose most of their trust and mark the robot as unreliable.[3][4]
Their second study proved the hypothesis that children would track how different robots learn and generalize new words to judge the robots. Children prefer the competent robot more and think it can be a better teacher.
Education – Assistive reading tool
The team developed a mobile app as a learning aid for children with dyslexia, who have problem in word decoding and reading comprehension. This reading problem not only jeopardizes their academic achievement and social-emotional outcome, and also will damage children’s social-emotional measures.[5]
Sumbul Khan, Attila Achenbach, Wei Quin Yow, and Lucienne Blessing. 2021. A Case Study on the Design of Touchscreen-Based User Interfaces for Multilingual Older Adults from Southeast Asian Backgrounds. In Asian CHI Symposium 2021 (Asian CHI Symposium 2021). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 167–173. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3429360.3468204
Li, Xiaoqian, and Wei Quin Yow. "Do children really have a trust bias? Preschoolers reject labels from previously inaccurate robots but not inaccurate humans." In CogSci, p. 3511. 2019.
Li, Xiaoqian, and Wei Quin Yow. "Do children really have a trust bias? Preschoolers reject labels from previously inaccurate robots but not inaccurate humans." In CogSci, p. 3511. 2019.
Li, X., & Yow, W. Q. (2018). Willingness to revise own testimony: 3-and 4-year-olds’ selective trust in unexpected testimony from accurate and inaccurate informants. Journal of experimental child psychology, 173, 1-15.
Yow, W.Q., Tan, T.N., & Lokanathan, T. (2019). Understanding, Designing and Developing Assistive Technology for Students with Dyslexia in Singapore Classroom. Proceedings of the 11th Asian Conference on Education.
