How Reliably Do Eye Parameters Indicate Internal Versus External Attentional Focus?

Eye behavior is increasingly used as an indicator of internal versus external focus of attention both in research and application. However, available findings are partly inconsistent, which might be attributed to the different nature of the employed types of internal and external cognition tasks. The present study, therefore, investigated how consistently different eye parameters respond to internal versus external attentional focus across three task modalities: numerical, verbal, and visuo-spatial. Three eye parameters robustly differentiated between internal and external attentional focus across all tasks. Blinks, pupil diameter variance, and fixation disparity variance were consistently increased during internally directed attention. We also observed substantial attentional focus effects on other parameters (pupil diameter, fixation disparity, saccades, and microsaccades), but they were moderated by task type. Single-trial analysis of our data using machine learning techniques further confirmed our results: Classifying the focus of attention by means of eye tracking works well across participants, but generalizing across tasks proves to be challenging. Based on the effects of task type on eye parameters, we discuss what eye parameters are best suited as indicators of internal versus external attentional focus in different settings.     

Digging deeper: A response to commentaries on The roots of human altruism

The current response discusses the insightful commentaries by Dale Hay (2009) and Karen Wynn (2009) on the proposal that human altruism has deep roots both in phylogeny and ontogeny ( Warneken & Tomasello, 2009 ). In particular, I focus on (a) what observational and experimental methods can reveal about altruistic motivations in children, (b) Wynn's idea that early altruism might confer a selective advantage to the infants themselves, and (c) how recent findings on young children's social ontology will enable us to test the hypothesis that ontogeny proceeds from rather global to more differentiated altruistic behaviours.     

重建社会实践

《重建社会实践》是F.伽塔里应《交往世界》杂志的稿约所写的一篇文章,也是作者临终前留给人类的最后一份礼物。面对霸权主义横行、唯科技主义泛滥、人口暴增、能源危机、环境污染、贫富悬殊、集权制度和恐怖主义等一系列国际问题,伽塔里提出了“重建社会实践”的方案。这是一个从政治、经济、法律、科技、心理、生态等多方面统筹兼顾的全球性协调治理的方略。今天读来仍然是那么发人深思。