We investigated 28 learners’ postural patterns associated with naturally occurring episodes of boredom, flow/engagement, confusion, frustration, and delight during a tutoring session with AutoTutor, a dialoguebased intelligent tutoring system. Training and validation data were collected in a learning session with AutoTutor, after which the learners’ affective states (i.e., emotions) were rated ...

We investigated the potential of automatic detection of a learner’s affective states from posture patterns and dialogue features obtained from an interaction with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system with conversational dialogue. Training and validation data were collected from the sensors in a learning session with AutoTutor, after which the affective states of the learner were rated by t...

Over the past decade, there has been growing interest in real-time assessment of student engagement and motivation during interactions with educational software. Detecting symptoms of disengagement, such as offtask behavior, has shown considerable promise for understanding students’ motivational characteristics during learning. In this paper, we investigate the affective role of off-task behavi...

Over the past decade, there has been growing interest in real-time assessment of student engagement and motivation during interactions with educational software. Detecting symptoms of disengagement, such as offtask behavior, has shown considerable promise for understanding students’ motivational characteristics during learning. In this paper, we investigate the affective role of off-task behavi...

Research shows that Group Support svstems (GS$) have dramatically increased group productivity. However, researchers m the field discovered that users sometimes find themselves feeling emotionally unjiiijiiied despite exceptionally good results. They report a loss of the affective reward often associated with a challenging meeting where they struggle and succeed. This lack of engagement has bee...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the affective modulation of the Stimulus-Preceding Negativity (SPN) and heart rate changes in anticipation of visual stimuli differing in emotional content. A S1-S2 task was employed with a word (S1) indicating the content of a subsequent emotional picture (S2). Both valence and arousal dimensions were manipulated by presenting positive and negati...

Affective reasoning holds significant potential for interactive digital entertainment, education, and training. Incorporating affective reasoning into the decision-making capabilities of interactive environments could enable them to create customized experiences that are dynamically tailored to individual users’ ever changing levels of engagement, interest, and emotional state. Because physiolo...

Intelligent tutoring systems research aims to produce systems that meet or exceed the effectiveness of one on one expert human tutoring. Theory and empirical study suggest that affective states of the learner must be addressed to achieve this goal. While many affective measures can be utilized, posture offers the advantages of non intrusiveness and ease of interpretation. This paper presents an...

Utility value is associated with positive learning outcomes in science and is often used to motivate engagement in the sciences, but less is known about what influences its development and maintenance, particularly during the critical middle school years. Using multinomial regression applied to longitudinal data from approximately 2600 middle-school students, we test the relationship of science...