Recent research has attempted to identify methods to mitigate cybersickness and examine its aftereffects. In this direction, this paper examines the effects of cybersickness on cognitive, motor, and reading performance in VR. Also, this paper evaluates the mitigating effects of music on cybersickness, as well as the role of gender, and the computing, VR, and gaming experience of the user. This paper reports two studies. In the 1st study, 92 participants selected the music tracks considered most calming (low valence) or joyful (high valence) to be used in the 2nd study. In the 2nd study, 39 participants performed an assessment four times, once before the rides (baseline), and then once after each ride (3 rides). In each ride either Calming, or Joyful, or No Music was played. During each ride, linear and angular accelerations took place to induce cybersickness in the participants. In each assessment, while immersed in VR, the participants evaluated their cybersickness symptomatology and performed a verbal working memory task, a visuospatial working memory task, and a psychomotor task. While responding to the cybersickness questionnaire (3D UI), eye-tracking was conducted to measure reading time and pupillometry. The results showed that Joyful and Calming music substantially decreased the intensity of nausea-related symptoms. However, only Joyful music significantly decreased the overall cybersickness intensity. Importantly, cybersickness was found to decrease verbal working memory performance and pupil size. Also, it significantly decelerated psychomotor (reaction time) and reading abilities. Higher gaming experience was associated with lower cybersickness. When controlling for gaming experience, there were no significant differences between female and male participants in terms of cybersickness. The outcomes indicated the efficiency of music in mitigating cybersickness, the important role of gaming experience in cybersickness, and the significant effects of cybersickness on pupil size, cognition, psychomotor skills, and reading ability.

Semantic fluency is a commonly used task in psychology that provides data about executive function and semantic memory. Performance on the task is affected by conditions ranging from depression to dementia. The task involves participants naming as many members of a given category (e.g. animals) as possible in sixty seconds. Most of the analyses reported in the literature only rely on word counts and transcribed data, and do not take into account the evidence of utterance planning present in the speech signal. Using data from Korean, we show how prosodic analyses can be combined with computational linguistic analyses of the words produced to provide further insights into the processes involved in producing fluency data. We compare our analyses to an established analysis method for semantic fluency data, manual determination of lexically coherent clusters of words.

Papers on voice interfaces for people with cognitive impairment or demenita only provide small snapshots of actual interactions, if at all. This is a major obstacle to the development of better interfaces. Transcripts of interactions between users and systems contain rich evidence of typical language patterns, indicate how users conceptualise their computer interlocutor, and highlight key design issues. In this paper, we introduce the CADENCE corpus and outline how it can be used to stimulate replicable research on inclusive voice interfaces. The CADENCE corpus is first data set of its kind to include rich data from people with cognitive impairment and free for research use. The corpus consists of transcribed spoken interactions between older people with and without cognitive impairment and a simulated Intelligent Cognitive Assistant and includes comprehensive data on users' cognitive abilities.

We evaluated two strategies for alleviating working memory load for users of voice interfaces: presenting fewer options per turn and providing confirmations. Forty-eight users booked appointments using nine different dialogue systems, which varied in the number of options presented and the confirmation strategy used. Participants also performed four cognitive tests and rated the usability of each dialogue system on a standardised questionnaire. When systems presented more options per turn and avoided explicit confirmation subdialogues, both older and younger users booked appointments more quickly without compromising task success. Users with lower information processing speed were less likely to remember all relevant aspects of the appointment. Working memory span did not affect appointment recall. Older users were slightly less satisfied with the dialogue systems than younger users. We conclude that the number of options is less important than an accurate assessment of the actual cognitive demands of the task at hand.