The Affective Tigger:
a study on the construction of an emotionally reactive toy

by


Dana Kirsch

B.S., Cognitive Science
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, 1997


Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Media Technology at the
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY


June 1999



Copyright MIT, 1999. All rights reserved.

Certified by

Rosalind W. Picard
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Accepted by

Stephen A. Benton
Chair, Departmental Committee on Graduate Students
Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis Committee

Thesis Reader

Hiroshi Ishii
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thesis Reader

Bruce Blumberg
Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT:

The Affective Tigger is a toy that responds to the user or playmate in a natural and emotive manner. Specifically, the Affective Tigger recognizes and reacts to the emotion the child is exhibiting. For example, when the child is `happily' playing with the Affective Tigger, she\footnote {For the duration of this thesis the child will be referred to as a `she' and Tigger as a `he' to avoid confusion.} might move and hold him in a manner that expresses this happiness: she might bounce him along the floor, or hug and kiss him. The Affective Tigger senses this physical interaction, for example he might recognize that the child is bouncing him, and outwardly expresses his own happiness in turn. In this manner, the Affective Tigger is both mimicking the mood expressed by the child and reacting to a behavior exhibited by the child, namely bouncing him. The Affective Tigger was evaluated by assessing the appropriateness of his responses to the child. In twelve play sessions, children were invited into the MIT Media Laboratory to play with the Affective Tigger. The results from these trials illustrated that three year olds are just beginning to recognize emotions in others, four year olds are in the process of discovering an awareness of `other', and five year old children are well on their way to developing empathy and other advanced emotional responses. It was also shown that a simple sensor-based behavior system such as the one in the Affective Tigger is sufficient to produce the compelling `appearance' that the Affective Tigger has feelings of his own. The big question, however, remains unanswered, could a child learn, from repeated exposure playing with the Affective Tigger, to recognize feelings and to respond appropriately to them?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Special thanks to my advisor Roz Picard for her suggestion of building a Tigger that responds to emotional expression, and for her patience, Bruce Blumberg for generating the spark that ignited this project, Hiroshi Ishii for challenging me to extend myself, Fred Martin for his help with the Handy Board, Linda Kiley for all her assistance, Chris Metcalfe for his voice, and Cole Porter for all those sanity/fetch breaks.

 
• Contents
• Introduction
  • Project Motivations
    • The Call for the Formalization of Emotional Education in Schools
    • Affective Computing
    • Related Work
  • Child Development
    • Moral Assumptions
    • Emotional Recognition in the Very Young Infant
    • Emotional Expression in the Infant
    • Acquisition of a Sense of Self and Other
    • The Emergence of Empathy in the Preschooler
    • The Role of Play in the Emotional Development of a Child
      • How Gender Biases a Child's Play
    • The theoretical use of the Affective Tigger as a tool for the emotional education of children with developmental impairments such as autism
• Pilot Study
  • Playing with a Stuffed Animal
  • Recognizing Tigger's Expressions
    • Redesigning the Affective Tigger
  • Preliminary Conclusions
• Constructing an Expressive Toy
  • Design Goals and Philosophy
    • Huggable Computing
    • Theory Why it will Work
  • Description of the Affective Tigger
    • Phase 1: Expression
    • Phase 2: Detection
      • Intonation and Vocal Emotional Expression
    • Phase 3: Recognition
  • Description of the Child for Which the Affective Tigger is Intended
  • Emotional Sensitivity
• The Child Trials
  • Method
    • Subjects
    • Data Quantification Procedure
  • Summary of Results and Discussion from the Child Trials
    • Error Analysis
• Evaluation
  • The Plush
  • The Child
  • Conclusion
• Laboratory Procedures
• The Release Forms for the Affective Tigger Trials
  • Consent Form (for the MIT community) for the Affective Tigger project
  • Consent Form (for the California Community) for the Affective Tigger project
  • Video Tape Consent
• Documents for the Affective Tigger Child Trials
  • The Story Line for the Affective Tigger
  • Preliminary Questions for the Affective Tigger Child Trials
  • Debriefing the Affective Tigger trial
  • The Follow up Phone call
• Quantified Results
  • The Independent Data Collection Survey
• Cost Estimate for the Affective Tigger Toy
• About the Author
  • Publications:
  • Awards:
  • Other:
• References
• About this document ...