Tobii EyeTracking's List: Cognitive & Behavioural Psychology

ABSTRACT
In this paper, we firstly present what is
Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC)
and rapidly how we have combined this
artificial intelligence technique with an eyetracker
for visual optimization. Next, in order
to correctly parameterize our application, we
present results from applying data mining
techniques on gaze information coming from
experiments conducted on about 80 human
individuals.

"A non-specific "top-heavy" configuration bias has been proposed to
explain neonatal face preference (F. Simion, E. Valenza, V. Macchi Cassia, C.
Turati, & C. Umiltà,
2002
). Using an eye tracker (Tobii T60), we investigated
whether the top-heavy bias is still present in 3- to 5.5-month-old infants and
in adults as a comparison group. Each infant and adult viewed three classes of
stimuli: simple geometric patterns, face-like figures, and photographs of faces.
Using area of interest analyses on fixation duration, we computed a top-heavy
bias index (a number between −1 and 1) for each individual. Our results showed
that the indices for the geometric and face-like patterns were about zero in
infants, indicating no consistent bias for the "top-heavy" configuration. In
adults, the indices for the geometric and face-like patterns were also close to
zero except for the T-shaped figure and the ones that had higher rating on
facedness. Moreover, the indices for photographs of faces were positive in both
infants and adults, indicating significant preferences for upright natural faces
over inverted ones. Taken together, we found no evidence for the top-heavy
configuration bias in both infants and adults. The absence of top-heavy bias
plus a clear preference for photographed upright faces in infants seem to
suggest an early cognitive specialization process toward face representation."

Knowing where people look when viewing faces provides an objective measure into the part of information entering the visual system as well as into the cognitive strategy involved in facial perception. In the present study, we recorded the eye movements of 20 congenitally deaf (10 male and 10 female) and 23 (11 male and 12 female) normal-hearing Japanese participants while they evaluated the emotional valence of static face stimuli. While no difference was found in the evaluation scores, the eye movements during facial observations differed among participant groups. 1The deaf group looked at the eyes more frequently and for longer duration than the nose whereas the hearing group focused on the nose (or the central region of face) more than the eyes. These results suggest that the strategy employed to extract visual information when viewing static faces may differ between deaf and hearing people.

ABSTRACT
The effect of layout in the comprehension of design pattern roles in UML class diagrams is assessed. This work replicates and extends a previous study using questionnaires but uses an eye tracker to gather additional data. The purpose of the replication is to gather more insight into the eye gaze behavior not evident from questionnaire-based methods. Similarities and differences between the studies are presented. Four design patterns are examined in two layout schemes in the context of three open source systems. Fifteen participants answered a series of eight design pattern role detection questions. Results show a significant improvement in role detection accuracy and visual effort with a certain layout for the Strategy and Observer patterns and a significant improvement in role detection time for all four patterns. Eye gaze data indicates classes participating in a design pattern act like visual beacons when they are in close physical proximity and follow the canonical layout, even though they violate some general graph aesthetics.

ABSTRACT
Research has shown that smokers have an attentional bias for pictorial smoking cues. The objective of the present study was to examine whether smokers also have an attentional bias for dynamic smoking cues in contemporary movies and therefore fixate more quickly, more often and for longer periods of time on dynamic smoking cues than non-smokers. By drawing upon established methods for assessing attentional biases for pictorial cues, we aimed to develop a new method for assessing attentional biases for dynamic smoking cues. We examined smokers’ and non-smokers’ eye movements while watching a movie clip by using eye-tracking technology. The sample consisted of 16 smoking and 17 non-smoking university students. Our results confirm the results of traditional pictorial attentional bias research. Smokers initially directed their gaze more quickly towards smoking-related cues (p = 0.01), focusing on them more often (p = 0.05) and for a longer duration (p = 0.01) compared with non-smokers. Thus, smoking cues in movies directly affect the attention of smokers. These findings indicate that the effects of dynamic smoking cues, in addition to other environmental smoking cues, need to be taken into account in smoking cessation therapies in order to increase successful smoking cessation and to prevent relapses.

ABSTRACT
This study combined an event schema approach with top-down processing perspectives to investigate whether high-functioning children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) spontaneously attend to and remember context-relevant aspects of scenes. Participants read one story of story-pairs (e.g., burglary or tea party). They then inspected a scene (living room) of which some objects were relevant in that context, irrelevant (related to the non-emphasized event) or neutral (scene-schema related). During immediate and delayed recall, only the (TD) groups selectively recalled context-relevant objects, and significantly more context-relevant objects than the ASD groups. Gaze-tracking suggests that one factor in these memory differences may be diminished top-down effects of event schemas on initial attention (first ten fixations) to relevant items in ASD.

ABSTRACT
This paper discusses and evaluates an agent model that is able to manipulate the visual attention of a human, in order to support naval crew. The agent model consists of four submodels, including a model to reason about a subject’s attention. The model was evaluated based on a practical case study which was formally analysed and verified using automated checking tools. Results show how a human subject’s attention is manipulated by adjusting luminance, based on assessment of the subject’s attention. These first evaluations of the agent show a positive effect.

ABSTRACT
The paper presents an empirical study with a digital educational game (DEG) called 80Days that aims at teaching geographical content. The goal of the study is twofold: (i) investigating the potential of the eye-tracking approach for evaluating DEG; (ii) studying the issue of vicarious learning in the context of DEG. Twenty-four university students were asked to view the videos of playing two micro-missions of 80Days, which varied with regard to the position of the non-player character (NPC) window (i.e. lower right vs. upper left) and the delivery of cognitive hints (i.e. with vs. without) in this text window. Eye movements of the participants were recorded with an eye-tracker. Learning effect and user experience were measured by questionnaires and interviews. Significant differences between the pre- and post-learning assessment tests suggest that observers can benefit from passive viewing of the recorded gameplay. However, the hypotheses that the game versions with cognitive hints and with the NPC window on the upper left corner can induce stronger visual attention and thus better learning effect are refuted.

ABSTRACT
Current research increasingly suggests that spatial cognition in humans is accomplished by many specialized mechanisms, each designed to solve a particular adaptive problem. A major adaptive problem for our hominin ancestors, particularly females, was the need to efficiently gather immobile foods which could vary greatly in quality, quantity, spatial location and temporal availability. We propose a cognitive model of a navigational gathering adaptation in humans and test its predictions in samples from the US and Japan. Our results are uniformly supportive: the human mind appears equipped with a navigational gathering adaptation that encodes the location of gatherable foods into spatial memory. This mechanism appears to be chronically active in women and activated under explicit motivation in men.

ABSTRACT
Two problem-solving experiments investigated the relationship between planning and the cost of accessing goal-state information using the theoretical framework of the soft constraints hypothesis (Gray & Fu, 2004; Gray, Simms, Fu, & Schoelles, 2006). In Experiment 1, 36 participants were allocated to low, medium, and high access cost conditions and completed a problem-solving version of the Blocks World Task. Both the nature of planning (memory based or display based) and its timing (before or during action) changed with high goal-state access cost (a mouse movement and a 2.5-s delay). In this condition more planning before action was observed, with less planning during action, evidenced by longer first-move latencies, more moves per goal-state inspection, and more short (≤0.8 s) and long (>8 s) “preplanned” intermove latencies. Experiment 2 used an eight-puzzle-like transformation task and replicated the effect of goal-state access cost when more complex planning was required, also confirmed by sampled protocol data. Planning before an episode of move making increased with higher goal-state access cost, and planning whilst making moves increased with lower access cost. These novel results are discussed in the context of the soft constraints hypothesis.

ABSTRACT
Infants turn their own eyes to others’ focus of attention. This action is called joint visual attention. It is known that the action develops from reflexive to intentional. In the early developmental process, it is pointed out that infants become intentional agents. We constructed a computational model to study intentional agency. The computational model has two main mechanisms. One is to form a memory of relationships between directions of others’ gaze and objects gazed at. The other is to associate the direction of others’ gaze with a target object. We suppose that the mechanisms realize an immature intentional agency. To demonstrate the mechanisms, we develop a robot to implement the computational model, and construct an experimental environment for human-robot interaction. We first test the experimental environment with the robot which produces only reflexive action. As a result, a participant in the test showed actions to explore the gaze object of the robot simply because the robot turned to face a different area from the person’s gaze. From the result we noticed a problem. When the robot gazes at a different object than the one the person looked at, we cannot distinguish between two possible causes. One is a mistaken reading of the person’s gaze. The other is an association with a different target object from the person’s gaze. We propose a solution to solve the problem by using a measurement device for the focus of the person’s gaze, and discuss a working hypothesis to demonstrate the function of our constructed mechanisms.

ABSTRACT
Cognitive interference resulting from simultaneous exposure to both an interactive advertisement and a program context may lead to less attention devoted to the ad. Using eye tracking, we study how a thematically (in)congruent program affects visual attention to an interactive ad, and how congruence moderates the effect on viewing attention of cognitive load resulting from time pressure. A congruent program leads to more ad viewing time and more gaze jumps between ad and program than an incongruent one. Time pressure significantly reduces ad viewing time in the congruent context, while it does not affect viewing time in the incongruent situation.

ABSTRACT
We measured HRV in 25 females while they were evaluating and reporting 48 affective pictures, which appeared on the screen for 20 s in random order. After reporting the SAM, the participant orally reported to the experimenter, what she saw, what had happened, and what was going to happen in the picture. Spectral analysis was performed on the data using the fast Fourier transform. Preliminary results indicate that during negative pictures, LF/HF activity is significantly higher in the picture phase than in the speech phase.

ABSTRACT
The goal of the experiment was to expose changes in viewing distance while evaluating and reporting 48 affective (IAPS) pictures. The experiment consisted of 25 female students. Pictures appeared on the screen for 20 secs in random order. After reporting the SAM, the participant orally reported to the experimenter what she saw, what had happened, and what was going to happen in the picture. Results indicated that subjects took the most distance from positive pictures and approached negative pictures, which was in contradiction with earlier studies. The effect of the reporting phase given to the subjects is discussed.

ABSTRACT
In both behavioural and brain-imaging studies, numerical magnitude comparison tasks have been used to glean insights into the processing and representation of numerical magnitude. The present study examined the extent to which eye movement data can be used to investigate the neurocognitive processes underlying numerical magnitude processing. Twenty-two participants performed a numerical comparison task (deciding which of two Arabic numerals represents the larger numerical magnitude) while eye tracking data was recorded. The ratio between numbers (smaller/larger) was manipulated and ranged from 0.11 to 0.89. Consistent with previous reaction time and accuracy studies, the present results demonstrated significant main effects of ratio on the number of fixations, as well as a significant main effect of correct (numerically larger) versus incorrect (numerically smaller) number on the duration of fixations. Furthermore, data from the present investigation also revealed that participants made significantly more saccades between the two numbers for large relative to small ratio trials. Moreover, the ratio effects on eye movements were uncorrelated with the effect of numerical ratio on reaction times, suggesting that eye tracking measures of number comparison may tap into a different level of numerical magnitude processing than reaction time measures do.

ABSTRACT
The aim of social robotics is to make robots that are integrated in our daily life and cooperate with humans. For efficient cooperation, the understanding of actions of other agents is important. In Artificial Intelligence the general assumption is that humans will perform the actions that are the most rational way to achieve a goal. Infant studies about action anticipation performed by Gergely, Nádasdy, Csibra and Bíró, (1995) and Csibra, Gergely, Bíró, Koós and Brockbank (1999) are often cited as support for the viability of that assumption. The present study, however, investigates the possibility that action anticipation is based on the frequency of an action instead of rationality. To test this hypothesis we performed an experiment using a habituation paradigm in which we measured the looking time as well as the anticipation of 9-month-old infants when they observed an agent performing one out of two possible actions. We manipulated the actions insofar as one of the actions was the more frequent but also more inefficient one, whereas the other was the more efficient but also more infrequent one. The anticipation measurements showed evidence for the frequency hypothesis, whereas the looking times provided no evidence for either the frequency hypothesis or the rationality theory. Therefore, it could be interesting to see how action models in Artificial Intelligence based on frequency will perform in comparison with or in cooperation with existing models based on rationality.

ABSTRACT
In categorization, emphasizing task-relevant information is critical for efficient performance. Such attentional optimization can occur concurrently with learning category structures, or may be delayed until after the categories have been mastered. Thus far, delayed attentional optimization has only been found in rule-based categories. The present studies use eye-tracking to investigate attentional optimization in rule-based (RB) and information integration (II) categories. Because working memory capacity is thought to reflect the ability to suppress task-irrelevant information, we also examined the relationship between Aospan performance and attentional optimization. We found that delayed attentional optimization is not a universal characteristic of RB categories, and that working memory predicts early attentional learning in simple categories, but predicts speed of category learning in complex categories. Working memory capacity's influence on optimization and performance does not differ between RB and II learning.

ABSTRACT
The adaptive regulation of the balance between exploitation and exploration is critical for the optimization of behavioral performance. Animal research and computational modeling have suggested that changes in exploitative vs. exploratory control state in response to changes in task utility are mediated by the neuromodulatory locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system. Recent studies have suggested that utility-driven changes in control state correlate with pupil diameter, and that pupil diameter can be used as an indirect marker of LC activity. We measured participants’ pupil diameter while they performed a gambling task with a gradually changing pay-off structure. Each choice in this task can be classified as exploitative or exploratory, using a computational model of reinforcement learning. We examined the relationship between pupil diameter, task utility and choice strategy (exploitation vs. exploration), and found that (i) exploratory choices were preceded by a larger baseline pupil diameter than exploitative choices; (ii) individual differences in baseline pupil diameter were predictive of an individual’s tendency to explore; and (iii) changes in pupil diameter surrounding the transition between exploitative and exploratory choices correlated with changes in task utility. These findings provide novel evidence that pupil diameter correlates closely with control state, and are consistent with a role for the LC-NE system in the regulation of the exploration-exploitation trade-off in humans.

ABSTRACT
Inferences about the psychobiological processes that underlie face perception have been drawn from the spontaneous behavior of eyes. Using a visual paired comparison task, we recorded the eye movements of twenty adults as they viewed pairs of faces that differed in their relative familiarity. The results indicate an advantage for novel viewpoints of familiar faces over familiar viewpoints of familiar faces and novel faces. We conclude that this preference serves the face recognition system by collecting the variation necessary to build robust representations of identity.

ABSTRACT
This study aims to investigate the effects of event type (concepts represented by the graph) in graph comprehension with three graph types (line, bar, area) and two graph designs (linear, round) by means of two different task types (trend assessment, discrete comparison). A novel round graph type was designed for that purpose. Five hypotheses were investigated: H1: Graph type affects comparison strategies; H2: Event type affects comparison strategies; H3: Graph design affects comparison strategies; H4: Graph design and event type interact; H5: Task type affects comparison strategies. As a method to collect data on subjects' graph perception and comprehension, behavioral (recollected values, word preferences in the description task) and eye-tracking data (scan paths, gaze length, number of fixation, fixation duration and number of transitions) were collected. As an outcome of this thesis, while the event type and the task type seemed to affect the graph comprehension, the effect of graph type, the graph design and interaction between graph design and event type were partially observed. These results point out that although round and linear graph designs are informationally equivalent, the round graphs are computationally better suited than linear graphs for the interpretation of cyclic concepts. However, grasping trend information for the linear events and making discrete comparisons were achieved with the same effort in both graph designs. This result is not trivial at all, given the fact that participants were not familiar with the round graph design and were confronted with them in this experiment for the first time.