Eye movements during the handwriting of words: Individually and within sentences

Handwriting, a complex motor process involves the coordination of both the upper limb and visual system. The gaze behavior that occurs during the handwriting process is an area that has been little studied. This study investigated the eye-movements of adults during writing and reading tasks. Eye and handwriting movements were recorded for six different words over three different tasks. The results compared reading and handwriting the same words, a between condition comparison and a comparison between the two handwriting tasks. Compared to reading, participants produced more fixations during handwriting tasks and the average fixation durations were longer. When reading fixations were found to be mostly around the center of word, whereas fixations when writing appear to be made for each letter in a written word and were located around the base of letters and flowed in a left to right direction. Between the two writing tasks more fixations were made when words were written individually compared to within sentences, yet fixation durations were no different. Correlation of the number of fixations made to kinematic variables revealed that horizontal size and road length held a strong correlation with the number of fixations made by participants.     

Quantifying Supervisory Decision Making: Eye‐Tracking Technology Applications for the Promotion of Child Safety

Previous research has investigated various risk factors correlated with childhood injury, but few studies have successfully investigated these variables beyond participant self‐report. The present study utilized infrared eye‐tracking and computer‐based latency measures to evaluate caregiver supervision decisions in injury risk situations for typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder. The sample included 99 young women, ages 18–24 years, who are frequent non‐parental caregivers for children. Results indicated that participants altered their speed of response, child monitoring, and intervention decisions on the basis of idiosyncratic assessment of injury risk. Minimal significant differences emerged with regard to supervision behavior and chosen strategies when comparing children with autism spectrum disorder to typically developing children. Overall, results suggest that non‐parental caregivers integrate child characteristics and environmental risk factors when assessing risk and choosing interventions. Implications are discussed with regard to injury prevention programs emphasizing protective aspects of supervision for children across various settings. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's and adults' parafoveal processes in German: Phonological and orthographic effects

Phonological and orthographic information has been shown to play an important role in parafoveal processing in skilled adult reading in English. In the present study, we investigated whether similar parafoveal effects can be found in children using the boundary eye tracking method. Children and adults read sentences in German with embedded target nouns which were presented in original, pseudohomophone (PsH), transposed-letter (TL), lower-case and control conditions to assess phonological and orthographic preview effects. We found evidence of PsH preview benefit effects for children. We also found TL preview benefit effects for adults, while children only showed these effects under specific conditions. Results are consistent with the developmental view that reading initially depends on phonological processes and that orthographic processes become increasingly important.     

Visual exploration of pedestrian crossings by adults and children: Comparison of strategies

In pedestrian crossing situations, children are less able to make safe crossing decisions compared to adults.The aim of the present study was to analyze and compare the ocular behaviour of children and adults in the pedestrian crossing situations using the eye tracking. The study involved 22 children ranging in age from 5 years to 6 years 2 months and 22 adults. Children and adults participated in a brief eye tracking session designed to explore field of view in road crossing scenarios. They were presented with four pictures of pedestrian crossing and instructed to observe the pictures as if they were on the sidewalk getting ready to cross the road. The eye movements of the subjects looking at the pictures on the screen were collected through the eye tracker.The results showed that adults used a far more intense exploration of the useful visual field of view. They looked at all the different areas of the field of view more frequently and for a longer time. Another interesting point is that the children gazed at areas and elements that are irrelevant to a safe crossing but prove salient for various reasons. Implications for road safety training are discussed.     

Identifying influential segments from word co-occurrence networks using AHP

Identifying important segments in textual data seems to be an important area of research for various applications including topic modelling, trend detection, summarization and event detection. In existing research work, different metrics have been studied to analyse the word co-occurrence network. This research work contributes towards non-semantic and an unsupervised topic identification using the word co-occurrence networks. In this research work, keyphrase have been identified by preserving the lexical sequence using a directed and weighted word co-occurrence network. Further AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) model based upon four significant attributes of the word co-occurrence networks have been proposed to rank the keyphrases. Most frequently occurring segment is identified as an influential segment. Experimental results proved high effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results for the First Story Detection, 72 Twitter TDT, synthesized Rio Olympics dataset have been discussed to demonstrate its potential in precisely discovering influential segments.     

The feasibility of an automated eye-tracking-modified Fagan test of memory for human faces in younger Ugandan HIV-exposed children

Objective: The Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence (FTII) uses longer gaze length for unfamiliar versus familiar human faces to gauge visual-spatial encoding, attention, and working memory in infants. Our objective was to establish the feasibility of automated eye tracking with the FTII in HIV-exposed Ugandan infants.

Method: The FTII was administered to 31 perinatally HIV-exposed noninfected (HEU) Ugandan children 6–12 months of age (11 boys; M = 0.69 years, SD = 0.14; 19 girls; M = 0.79, SD = 0.15). A series of 10 different faces were presented (familiar face exposure for 25 s followed by a gaze preference trial of 15 s with both the familiar and unfamiliar faces). Tobii X2-30 infrared camera for pupil detection provided automated eye-tracking measures of gaze location and length during presentation of Ugandan faces selected to correspond to the gender, age (adult, child), face expression, and orientation of the original FTII. Eye-tracking gaze length for unfamiliar faces was correlated with performance on the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL).

Results: Infants gazed longer at the novel picture compared to familiar across 10 novelty preference trials. Better MSEL cognitive development was correlated with proportionately longer time spent looking at the novel faces (r(30) = 0.52, p = .004); especially for the Fine Motor Cognitive Sub-scale (r(30) = 0.54, p = .002).

Conclusion: Automated eye tracking in a human face recognition test proved feasible and corresponded to the MSEL composite cognitive development in HEU infants in a resource-constrained clinical setting. Eye tracking may be a viable means of enhancing the validity and accuracy of other neurodevelopmental measures in at-risk children in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Age effects and gaze patterns in recognising emotional expressions: An in-depth look at gaze measures and covariates

The present study investigated predictors of age effects in emotion recognition accuracy. Older and younger adults were tested on a battery of cognitive, vision, and affective questionnaires; participants' eyes were also tracked while they completed an emotion recognition task. Older adults were worse at recognising sad, angry, and fearful expressions than younger adults. When controlling for covariates related to emotion recognition accuracy, younger adults still outperformed older adults in recognising anger and sadness. Younger adults tended to pay more attention to the eyes than older adults. Results suggest that age-related gaze patterns in emotion recognition may depend on the specific emotion being recognised and may not generalise across stimuli sets.     

Being of two minds: Switching mindsets exhausts self-regulatory resources

The human psyche is equipped with the capacity to solve problems using different mental states or mindsets. Different mindsets can lead to different judgment and decision making styles, each associated with its own perspective and biases. To change perspective, people can, and often do, switch mindsets. We argue, however, that mindset switching can be costly for subsequent decisions. We propose that mindset switching is an executive function that relies on the same psychological resource that governs other acts of executive functioning, including self-regulation. This implies that there are psychic costs to switching mindsets that are borne out in depleted executive resources. One implication of this framework is that switching mindsets should render people more likely to fail at subsequent self-regulation than they would if maintaining a consistent mindset. The findings from experiments that manipulated mindset switching in five domains support this model.