眼动技术在个体认知能力差异研究中的应用

本文从可能性和可行性两方面介绍和论述了眼动技术在个体认知能力差异研究中的应用。在可能性方面,个体眼动特征具有的良好的重测信度和内部一致性信度;在可行性方面,已有研究利用注视和眼跳相关指标、眼动轨迹和瞳孔直径这三类指标对该问题进行探索,结果均发现这些眼动特征与认知能力之间存在着密切关系。今后研究应继续深入探索两者关系的内在认知和神经机制,并尝试结合人工智能算法开发高信效度的眼动认知测验。     

不同呈现方式的网页广告的眼动研究

选择25名视力正常的大学生,用眼动仪记录他们浏览不同呈现方式、不同位置的网页广告的眼动过程。结果发现：1．对于不同呈现方式的网页广告,从记忆成绩看：彩色组显著优于黑白组,两者与动画组没有显著差异;从眼动指标看：动画组和彩色组的注视次数和注视时的明显高于黑白组。2．网页广告的位置对被试的记忆成绩与眼动模式有一定的影响,表现为上部与中部注视次数增加,注视时间长。记忆成绩也表现为差异显著,中部与上部的记忆效果好。     

有关眼动的几个理论模型

本文主要以时间为线索，介绍了当代阅读心理学家对此问题进行探讨的六个理论模型．早期的理论模型主张眼动与大脑对语义进行加工之间没有关系．随着研究的深入，新的理论模型否定了这种主张，提出它们之间存在一定的关系．     

聋人阅读的眼动研究

聋人读者普遍存在阅读困难,通过眼动技术来探索聋人阅读中的基本问题已成为一种新趋势,聋人读者在阅读过程中存在其独特的眼动模式。在回顾以往聋人阅读眼动研究的基础上,提出了对未来研究的展望:(1)眼动技术的广泛应用是聋人阅读研究的一个新趋势;(2)从跨文化研究视角探究中外聋人阅读加工的异同;(3)考察聋人视觉注意的特点与语言加工之间的关系;(4)通过眼动技术考察聋人读者的手语加工效率。     

不同Fan范式下工作记忆对记忆提取的影响

根据Fan范式编写实验材料,以眼动仪为工具,选取40名大学生为被试探讨不同Fan范式下工作记忆对记忆提取的影响。结果表明:工作记忆容量低的条件下,目标项与干扰项的错误率存在显著差异(F=3.72,p<0.05),不同地点Fan等级的反应时存在非常显著差异(F=5.55,p=0.00)以及注视点数存在显著差异(F=3.50,p<0.05)。工作记忆容量的大小对记忆提取的结果有影响,眼动能够有效反映记忆提取的过程,实验支持独立因素眼动模型。     

表象建构中的眼动机制

表象与知觉的关系一直是空间认知领域关注的热点问题,眼动轨迹的相似性是表象与知觉认知过程相关性的重要外显形式。本文结合实证研究,从信息加工的角度系统分析知觉眼动和表象眼动的差异性,深入探讨表象建构中的眼动机制,有力地支持了表象眼动的机能性作用。最后对未来表象眼动的研究加以展望。     

阅读研究中的主要眼动指标评述

眼跳和注视是阅读过程中的两种基本眼动现象.目前在对阅读的眼动研究中分析指标主要包括两类,一类是与眼睛何时移动有关的时间维度的眼动指标,具体包括以字或词为兴趣区的眼动指标,如单一注视时间、首次注视时间、第二次注视时间、凝视时间、离开目标后的首次注视时间、回视时间和总注视时间等,以及以短语或句子为兴趣区的眼动指标,如第一遍阅读时间、向前阅读时间、第二遍阅读时间、回视路径阅读时间、重读时间等.另一类是与眼睛移动位置有关的空间维度的眼动指标,具体包括眼跳距离、注视位置、注视次数、跳读率、再注视比率和回视次数等.在使用眼动指标时,需要注意眼动指标的分类、原始数据的删除标准以及眼动指标的选择等问题.     

质量表征和眼动过度追踪对表征动量的影响

人们对运动目标最终位置的记忆常常会向运动方向发生偏移, 这种偏移被称为“表征动量”。现有研究对表征动量的解释涉及从低水平的知觉加工到高水平的认知加工等多个方面。本研究采用不同材质和滚动声音的球体作为刺激材料, 考察高水平的质量表征对表征动量的影响以及知觉水平的眼动信息在其中的作用。实验1探讨了对目标质量的主观表征对眼动追踪和表征动量的影响。结果显示, 质量表征会同时影响眼动追踪和表征动量。实验2通过不同的提示线索控制眼动追踪, 进一步探讨眼动过度追踪对表征动量的影响。我们发现, 非自然追踪的条件下, 表征动量会减小, 且质量表征对表征动量的影响不再显著。本研究结果表明, 高水平的质量表征对表征动量的影响会通过知觉水平的眼动过度追踪起作用; 然而, 表征动量还受其它因素影响, 眼动信息并非决定表征动量的唯一因素。     

大学生问题发现过程的眼动研究

在潜藏式与矛盾式两类问题发现情境中, 以眼动仪为研究工具, 问题发现能力高与低的大学生各20名为被试, 探讨大学生在问题发现总体和4个兴趣区中的眼动特征及其与发现问题数量和质量之间的关系。研究表明：(1)不同能力大学生在不同情境及其兴趣区中的问题发现差异, 能够体现在眼动指标上。回视是反映问题发现能力的敏感指标。回视次数和发现问题数量与质量之间的正相关, 以及在高能力组学生上的优势, 体现了信息的联系和整合性加工在问题发现中具有积极意义。(2)潜藏式问题发现中, 个体平均注视时间更长, 反映其认知加工难度更大。在提供重要信息的区域, 被试会投入更多精力, 表现为在注视时间、注视次数和瞳孔直径大小等指标的上升。(3)眼睛注视区域与发现问题区域间存在对应关系, 显示出“眼随心动”现象。在问题发现的最初和最终阶段, 被试都会出现跨区信息搜寻行为, 分别代表了对问题线索的寻找和最后的检查评估。高能力被试在每个稳定注视阶段的注视时间更短, 这种信息转换的灵活性体现出其信息加工上的优势。动态眼动轨迹分析揭示了单个静态指标难以反映的新特点。     

眼动记录技术与方法综述

眼动记录法是一种重要的心理学研究方法,目前已被广泛地应用于心理学的基础研究和应用研究领域之中。本文对主要的眼动记录方法进行了总结和分析,对国内外眼动记录仪的研制和发展情况进行了介绍,并就眼动记录技术和方法的前景提出了几点看法。     

Content,not context,facilitates memory for real-world scenes

ABSTRACT

Can eye movements tell us whether people will remember a scene? In order to investigate the link between eye movements and memory encoding and retrieval, we asked participants to study photographs of real-world scenes while their eye movements were being tracked. We found eye gaze patterns during study to be predictive of subsequent memory for scenes. Moreover, gaze patterns during study were more similar to gaze patterns during test for remembered than for forgotten scenes. Thus, eye movements are indeed indicative of scene memory. In an explicit test for context effects of eye movements on memory, we found recognition rate to be unaffected by the disruption of spatial and/or temporal context of repeated eye movements. Therefore, we conclude that eye movements cue memory by selecting and accessing the most relevant scene content, regardless of its spatial location within the scene or the order in which it was selected.     

Horizontal saccadic eye movements enhance the retrieval of landmark shape and location information

Recent work has demonstrated that horizontal saccadic eye movements enhance verbal episodic memory retrieval, particularly in strongly right-handed individuals. The present experiments test three primary assumptions derived from this research. First, horizontal eye movements should facilitate episodic memory for both verbal and non-verbal information. Second, the benefits of horizontal eye movements should only be seen when they immediately precede tasks that demand right and left-hemisphere processing towards successful performance. Third, the benefits of horizontal eye movements should be most pronounced in the strongly right-handed. Two experiments confirmed these hypotheses: horizontal eye movements increased recognition sensitivity and decreased response times during a spatial memory test relative to both vertical eye movements and fixation. These effects were only seen when horizontal eye movements preceded episodic memory retrieval, and not when they preceded encoding (Experiment 1). Further, when eye movements preceded retrieval, they were only beneficial with recognition tests demanding a high degree of right and left-hemisphere activity (Experiment 2). In both experiments the beneficial effects of horizontal eye movements were greatest for strongly right-handed individuals. These results support recent work suggesting increased interhemispheric brain activity induced by bilateral horizontal eye movements, and extend this literature to the encoding and retrieval of landmark shape and location information.     

EMDR: eye movements superior to beeps in taxing working memory and reducing vividness of recollections

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is effectively treated with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) with patients making eye movements during recall of traumatic memories. Many therapists have replaced eye movements with bilateral beeps, but there are no data on the effects of beeps. Experimental studies suggest that eye movements may be beneficial because they tax working memory, especially the central executive component, but the presence/degree of taxation has not been assessed directly. Using discrimination Reaction Time (RT) tasks, we found that eye movements slow down RTs to auditive cues (experiment I), but binaural beeps do not slow down RTs to visual cues (experiment II). In an arguably more sensitive “Random Interval Repetition” task using tactile stimulation, working memory taxation of beeps and eye movements were directly compared. RTs slowed down during beeps, but the effects were much stronger for eye movements (experiment III). The same pattern was observed in a memory experiment with healthy volunteers (experiment IV): vividness of negative memories was reduced after both beeps and eye movements, but effects were larger for eye movements. Findings support a working memory account of EMDR and suggest that effects of beeps on negative memories are inferior to those of eye movements.     

Effects of saccadic bilateral eye movements on memory in children and adults: an exploratory study

The effects of saccadic bilateral (horizontal) eye movements on true and false memory in adults and children were investigated. Both adults and children encoded lists of associated words in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm followed by a test of recognition memory. Just prior to retrieval, participants were asked to engage in 30s of bilateral vs. vertical vs. no eye movements. For studied information, the results for adults replicated previous work; bilateral eye movements were demonstrated to increase the accuracy of memory by increasing the hit rate and reducing the false alarm rate for related and unrelated recognition test lures. The results for children also indicated an improvement in memory accuracy, and like adults, was due to both an increase in the hit rate and a reduction in the false alarm rate. In spite of these similarities, the effects of bilateral eye movements differed between adults and children for critical unstudied words; i.e., those associated with the theme of the list. Only in adults did, bilateral eye movements reduce associative false memories; children did not show a reduction in false memory for critical associates. This produced a dissociation between the effects of eye movements on associative false memory as a function of age. The results are discussed from a developmental perspective in terms of potential mechanisms underlying true and false memory.     

The selective disruption of spatial working memory by eye movements

In the late 1970s/early 1980s, Baddeley and colleagues conducted a series of experiments investigating the role of eye movements in visual working memory. Although only described briefly in a book (Baddeley, 1986), these studies have influenced a remarkable number of empirical and theoretical developments in fields ranging from experimental psychology to human neuropsychology to nonhuman primate electrophysiology. This paper presents, in full detail, three critical studies from this series, together with a recently performed study that includes a level of eye movement measurement and control that was not available for the older studies. Together, the results demonstrate several facts about the sensitivity of visuospatial working memory to eye movements. First, it is eye movement control, not movement per se, that produces the disruptive effects. Second, these effects are limited to working memory for locations and do not generalize to visual working memory for shapes. Third, they can be isolated to the storage/maintenance components of working memory (e.g., to the delay period of the delayed-recognition task). These facts have important implications for models of visual working memory.     

The effects of eye and limb movements on working memory

Three experiments examined the role of eye and limb movements in the maintenance of information in spatial working memory. In Experiment 1, reflexive saccades interfered with memory span for spatial locations but did not interfere with memory span for letters. In Experiment 2, three different types of eye movements (reflexive saccades, pro-saccades, and anti-saccades) interfered with working memory to the same extent. In all three cases, spatial working memory was much more affected than verbal working memory. The results of these two experiments suggest that eye movements interfere with spatial working memory primarily by disrupting processes localised in the visuospatial sketchpad. In Experiment 3, limb movements performed while maintaining fixation produced as much interference with spatial working memory as reflexive saccades. These results suggest that the interference produced by eye movements is not the result of their visual consequences. Rather, all spatially directed movements appear to have similar effects on visuospatial working memory.     

Visual and verbal working memory loads interfere with scene-viewing

Working memory is thought to be divided into distinct visual and verbal subsystems. Studies of visual working memory frequently use verbal working memory tasks as control conditions and/or use articulatory suppression to ensure that visual load is not transferred to verbal working memory. Using these verbal tasks relies on the assumption that the verbal working memory load will not interfere with the same processes as visual working memory. In the present study, participants maintained a visual or verbal working memory load as they simultaneously viewed scenes while their eye movements were recorded. Because eye movements and visual working memory are closely linked, we anticipated the visual load would interfere with scene-viewing (and vice versa), while the verbal load would not. Surprisingly, both visual and verbal memory loads interfered with scene-viewing behavior, while eye movements during scene-viewing did not significantly interfere with performance on either memory task. These results suggest that a verbal working memory load can interfere with eye movements in a visual task.

     

Gesturing during mental problem solving reduces eye movements,especially for individuals with lower visual working memory capacity

Non-communicative hand gestures have been found to benefit problem-solving performance. These gestures seem to compensate for limited internal cognitive capacities, such as visual working memory capacity. Yet, it is not clear how gestures might perform this cognitive function. One hypothesis is that gesturing is a means to spatially index mental simulations, thereby reducing the need for visually projecting the mental simulation onto the visual presentation of the task. If that hypothesis is correct, less eye movements should be made when participants gesture during problem solving than when they do not gesture. We therefore used mobile eye tracking to investigate the effect of co-thought gesturing and visual working memory capacity on eye movements during mental solving of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Results revealed that gesturing indeed reduced the number of eye movements (lower saccade counts), especially for participants with a relatively lower visual working memory capacity. Subsequent problem-solving performance was not affected by having (not) gestured during the mental solving phase. The current findings suggest that our understanding of gestures in problem solving could be improved by taking into account eye movements during gesturing.