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In order to investigate the cultural differences in recognizing cartoon facial
expressions in both ways, we plan to conduct a subsequent experiment with
Hungarian designed cartoon faces. We expect to have different drawing styles of
virtual agent faces, since Hungary has not been exposed to Japanese comic/anime
culture compared to other European/American countries. Evaluation from other
countries than Hungary and Japan is also needed to eliminate in-group advantage
within a country or a culture.
5 Conclusion
This paper applies the psychological findings on cultural differences on facial regions
used as cues to recognize human facial expressions to the cases of animated virtual
agent faces. Our preliminary results support the hypothesis. There are cultural
differences when using facial regions as cues to recognize cartoonish facial
expressions between Hungary and Japan. Japanese weighed facial cues in the eye
regions more heavily than Hungarians, who weighed facial cues in the mouth region
more heavily than Japanese. We also confirmed that, regardless of the country, the
mouth region more effectively conveys the emotions of facial expressions than the
eye region.
We believe the results can be used not only to derive facial expression design
guidelines of virtual agents when aiming at users of a single culture, but as adaptation
strategies in applications with multicultural users. The virtual agent's facial
expressions may be fine-tuned for optimal recognition for the given culture. The
results also can be applied to designing a physical robot facial expressions to
minimize mechanical movements to create its facial expressions according to the
culture the robot serves.
Acknowledgements.
This research is supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific
Research (C) 20500196 (2008-2010) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science. CharToon was developed by Zsofia Ruttkay and Han Noot.
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