OGAMA (Open Gaze and Mouse Analyzer): Open-source software designed to analyze eye and mouse movements in slideshow study designs

In the present article, a new software is introduced that allows the recording and analyzing of eye- and mouse-tracking data from slideshow-based experiments in parallel. The Open Gaze and Mouse Analyzer (OGAMA) is written in C#.NET and has been released as an open-source project. Its main features include slide-show design, the recording of gaze and mouse data, database-driven preprocessing and filtering of gaze and mouse data, the creation of attention maps, areas-of-interest definition, and replay. Eyetracking and/or presentation soft- and hardware recordings in ASCII format can be imported. Data output is provided that can be used directly with different statistical software packages. Because it is open source, one can easily adapt it to suit one’s needs.     

What is pressure? Evidence for social pressure as a type of regulatory focus

Previous research (Markman, Maddox, & Worthy, 2006) suggests that pressure leads to choking when one is learning to classify items on the basis of an explicit rule, but it leads to excelling when one is learning to classify items on the basis of an implicit strategy. In this article, we relate social pressure to regulatory focus theory. We propose that the effects of pressure on performance arise because pressure induces a prevention focus that interacts with the more local reward structure of the task. To test this hypothesis, we repeated previous research, but using a losses reward structure, so that participants under pressure were in a regulatory fit. We also successfully replicated previous results by using a gains reward structure. In contrast with participants who attempted to maximize gains on each trial, participants who attempted to minimize losses choked on the implicit-learning task but excelled on the explicit-learning task. The results suggest a three-way interaction between pressure level, task type, and reward structure.     

An empirical and computational investigation of perceiving and remembering event temporal relations

Events have beginnings, ends, and often overlap in time. A major question is how perceivers come to parse a stream of multimodal information into meaningful units and how different event boundaries may vary event processing. This work investigates the roles of these three types of event boundaries in constructing event temporal relations. Predictions were made based on how people would err according to the beginning state, end state, and overlap heuristic hypotheses. Participants viewed animated events that include all the logical possibilities of event temporal relations, and then made temporal relation judgments. The results showed that people make use of the overlap between events and take into account the ends and beginnings, but they weight ends more than beginnings. Neural network simulations showed a self-organized distinction when learning temporal relations between events with overlap versus those without.     

Learning nonlinearly separable categories by inference and classification

Previous research suggests that learning categories by classifying new instances highlights information that is useful for discriminating between categories. In contrast, learning categories by making predictive inferences focuses learners on an abstract summary of each category (e.g., the prototype). To test this characterization of classification and inference learning further, the authors evaluated the two learning procedures with nonlinearly separable categories. In contrast to previous research involving cohesive, linearly separable categories, the authors found that it is more difficult to learn nonlinearly separable categories by making inferences about features than it is to learn them by classifying instances. This finding reflects that the prototype of a nonlinearly separable category does not provide a good summary of the category members. The results from this study suggest that having a cohesive category structure is more important for inference than it is for classification.     

Effects of caffeine on performance of low intensity tasks

31 college age men and women who consume less than three caffeinated beverages per week agreed to participate as subjects in research on the effects of acute caffeine intake on low intensity task performance. All subjects performed two randomly administered test conditions: (1) caffeine (5 mg/kg) and (2) placebo on separate visits following an initial 1-hr. orientation visit. Subjects were administered the beverage 30 min. prior to performing 12 separate tests assessing basic mathematics, simple response, logical reasoning, hand-eye coordination, and spatial and assembly skills. The Spielberger State Anxiety test was administered immediately after consuming the test beverage and once again at posttest. Analysis showed that caffeine did not significantly affect performance on all tests with the exception of the peripheral awareness (hand-eye coordination) test on which performance was higher after ingesting caffeine. The placebo treatment produced no effect on state anxiety, which contrasted with a significant rise in anxiety after caffeine consumption. State anxiety values were significantly greater after caffeine treatment relative to the placebo at pretest, and this difference persisted at posttest. These results demonstrated that the dose of caffeine increased scores on state anxiety for individuals who consumed less than three caffeinated beverages weekly but had very little effect on performance of low intensity tasks, except for a hand-eye coordination test involving peripheral awareness. Perhaps longer continuous performance of more demanding tasks would be more sensitive.     

Overt and covert object-based attention

To examine the role of perceptual object representations in the control of eye movements and attention, a pair of experiments adapted the object-cuing paradigm of Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) to require eye movements. Displays were pairs of adjacent rectangles, each containing two characters. Observers were asked to make a speeded judgment of a target character’s orientation, and a cue was provided prior to target/distractor onset to indicate the target’s likely location. Gaze-contingent presentation of target and distractors was used to demand overt scanning of displays. Eye movements during task performance evinced two forms of object-based effects. First, saccades following fixation on an invalidly cued item were more likely to be made within the cued rectangle than between rectangles. Second, saccades within the cued rectangle were preceded by shorter dwell times than saccades between rectangles. Extrafoveal processing of stimuli within the cued rectangle, however, was not facilitated, suggesting that covert attention was not allocated more densely within the cued than within the uncued object.     

Targets' Awareness of Expectations and Behavioral Confirmation in Ongoing Interactions

Participants engaged in a getting-acquainted interaction over an intercom after one participant (the perceiver) was provided with a positive (extraverted) or relatively negative (introverted) expectation about the other participant (the target). After completing evaluations of each other and the interaction, participants interacted for a second time. Prior to this second interaction, however, targets were made aware of the perceivers' initial expectation, told that it had been confirmed by their own behavior, and given a randomly assigned attribution (either dispositional or situational) about the perceived cause of their confirmatory behavior. Results demonstrated that targets made aware of dispositionally attributed and relatively negative expectations were more likely to increase in expectation-disconfirming behavior, compared to targets made aware of situationally attributed and relatively negative expectations, who were themselves more likely to continue to confirm the expectations. Implications for the study of behavioral confirmation of expectations and other interpersonal processes are discussed.     

Biological and environmental initial conditions shape the trajectories of cognitive and social‐emotional development across the first years of life

Human development is thought to evolve from the dynamic interchange of biological dispositions and environmental provisions; yet the effects of specific biological and environmental birth conditions on the trajectories of cognitive and social‐emotional growth have rarely been studied. We observed 126 children at six time‐points from birth to 5 years. Intelligence, maternal sensitivity, and child social engagement were repeatedly tested. Effects of neonatal vagal tone (VT) and maternal postpartum depressive symptoms on growth‐rates were assessed. Cognitive development showed a substantial growth‐spurt between 2 and 5 years and social engagement increased rapidly across the first year and more gradually thereafter. VT improved cognitive and social‐emotional growth‐rates across the first year, whereas maternal depressive symptoms interfered with growth from 2 to 5 years. Differences between infants with none, one, or two non‐optimal birth conditions increased with age. Findings shed light on the dynamics of early development as it is shaped by biological and environmental initial conditions.     

Visual and haptic feedback contribute to tuning and online control during object manipulation

The authors employed a virtual environment to investigate how humans use haptic and visual feedback in a simple, rhythmic object-manipulation task. The authors hypothesized that feedback would help participants identify the appropriate resonant frequency and perform online control adjustments. The 1st test was whether sensory feedback is needed at all; the 2nd was whether the motor system combines visual and haptic feedback to improve performance. Task performance was quantified in terms of work performed on the virtual inertia, ability to identify the correct rhythm, and variability of movement. Strict feedforward control was found to be ineffective for this task, even when participants had previous knowledge of the rhythm. Participants (N = 11) performed far better when feedback was available (11 times more work, 2.2 times more precise frequency, 30% less variability; p < .05 for all 3 performance measures). Using sensory feedback, participants were able to rapidly identify 4 different spring-inertia systems without foreknowledge of the corresponding resonant frequencies. They performed over 20% more work with 24% less variability when provided with both visual and haptic feedback than they did with either feedback channel alone (p < .05), providing evidence that they integrated online sensory channels. Whereas feedforward control alone led to poor performance, feedback control led to fast tuning or calibration of control according to the resonant frequency of the object, and to better control of the rhythmic movement itself.