Simulation of Pseudo Inner Reading Voices and Evaluation of Effect on Human Processing

Abstract

We propose a pseudo inner reading voices (IRVs) interface to perform decision making from an external perspective, thereby creating an illusion that information is being processed by oneself. This does not imply that decisions are made according to someone else’s instructions; rather, this creates an illusion that the decision was willfully made by one’s own self. The belief that a person made his/her own decision can help reduce the mental workload. Although unfamiliarity with recorded voices has often been studied in perceptual research, there exists no filter that can convert recorded voices into familiar voices. Therefore, we reconstructed bone and air conduction models, measured the bone- and air-conducted sounds separately, weighted the ratio of both sounds, and superimposed them to reproduce a subject’s own voice. Next, in the counting experiment, it was confirmed that the pseudo IRVs can bias the information processing of human beings without increasing the mental workload.