Is gaze behaviour in a laboratory context similar to that in real-life? A study in bicyclists

Numerous laboratory-based studies recorded eye movements in participants with varying expertise when watching video projections in the lab. Although research in the lab offers the advantage of internal validity, reliability and ethical considerations, ecological validity is often questionable. Therefore the current study compared visual search in 13 adult cyclists, when cycling a real bicycle path and while watching a film clip of the same road. Dwell time towards five Areas of Interest (AOIs) is analysed. Dwell time (%) in the lab and real-life was comparable only for the low quality bicycle path. Both in real-life and the lab, gaze is predominantly driven towards the road. Since gaze behaviour in the lab and real-life tends to be comparable with increasing task-complexity (road quality), it is concluded that under certain task constraints laboratory experiments making use of video clips might provide valuable information regarding gaze behaviour in real-life.     

Visual perceptual and handwriting skills in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder

ObjectiveChildren with Developmental Coordination Disorder demonstrate a lack of automaticity in handwriting as measured by pauses during writing. Deficits in visual perception have been proposed in the literature as underlying mechanisms of handwriting difficulties in children with DCD. The aim of this study was to examine whether correlations exist between measures of visual perception and visual motor integration with measures of the handwriting product and process in children with DCD.MethodThe performance of twenty-eight 8–14 year-old children who met the DSM-5 criteria for DCD was compared with 28 typically developing (TD) age and gender-matched controls. The children completed the Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration (VMI) and the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills (TVPS). Group comparisons were made, correlations were conducted between the visual perceptual measures and handwriting measures and the sensitivity and specificity examined.ResultsThe DCD group performed below the TD group on the VMI and TVPS. There were no significant correlations between the VMI or TVPS and any of the handwriting measures in the DCD group. In addition, both tests demonstrated low sensitivity.ConclusionClinicians should execute caution in using visual perceptual measures to inform them about handwriting skill in children with DCD.     

Visual search for emotional expressions: Effect of stimulus set on anger and happiness superiority

Prior reports of preferential detection of emotional expressions in visual search have yielded inconsistent results, even for face stimuli that avoid obvious expression-related perceptual confounds. The current study investigated inconsistent reports of anger and happiness superiority effects using face stimuli drawn from the same database. Experiment 1 excluded procedural differences as a potential factor, replicating a happiness superiority effect in a procedure that previously yielded an anger superiority effect. Experiments 2a and 2b confirmed that image colour or poser gender did not account for prior inconsistent findings. Experiments 3a and 3b identified stimulus set as the critical variable, revealing happiness or anger superiority effects for two partially overlapping sets of face stimuli. The current results highlight the critical role of stimulus selection for the observation of happiness or anger superiority effects in visual search even for face stimuli that avoid obvious expression related perceptual confounds and are drawn from a single database.     

Visual perspective in remembering and episodic future thought

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, remembering and episodic future thinking are supported by a common set of constructive processes. In the present study, we directly addressed this assertion in the context of third-person perspectives that arise during remembering and episodic future thought. Specifically, we examined the frequency with which participants remembered past events or imagined future events from third-person perspectives. We also examined the different viewpoints from which third-person perspective events were remembered or imagined. Although future events were somewhat more likely to be imagined from a third-person perspective, the spatial viewpoint distributions of third-person perspectives characterizing remembered and imagined events were highly similar. These results suggest that a similar constructive mechanism may be at work when people remember events from a perspective that could not have been experienced in the past and when they imagine events from a perspective that could not be experienced in the future. The findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with—and as extensions of—the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis.     

Attentional effects on orientation judgements are dependent on memory consolidation processes

Are the effects of memory and attention on perception synergistic, antagonistic, or independent? Tested separately, memory and attention have been shown to affect the accuracy of orientation judgements. When multiple stimuli are presented sequentially versus simultaneously, error variance is reduced. When a target is validly cued, precision is increased. What if they are manipulated together? We combined memory and attention manipulations in an orientation judgement task to answer this question. Two circular gratings were presented sequentially or simultaneously. On some trials a brief luminance cue preceded the stimuli. Participants were cued to report the orientation of one of the two gratings by rotating a response grating. We replicated the finding that error variance is reduced on sequential trials. Critically, we found interacting effects of memory and attention. Valid cueing reduced the median, absolute error only when two stimuli appeared together and improved it to the level of performance on uncued sequential trials, whereas invalid cueing always increased error. This effect was not mediated by cue predictiveness; however, predictive cues reduced the standard deviation of the error distribution, whereas nonpredictive cues reduced “guessing”. Our results suggest that, when the demand on memory is greater than a single stimulus, attention is a bottom-up process that prioritizes stimuli for consolidation. Thus attention and memory are synergistic.     

Is anaphoric reference cooperative?

Two experiments investigated whether the choice of anaphoric expression is affected by the presence of an addressee. Following a context sentence and visual scene, participants described a target scene that required anaphoric reference. They described the scene either to an addressee (Experiment 1) or without an addressee (Experiment 2). When an addressee was present in the task, participants used more pronouns and fewer repeated noun phrases when the referent was the grammatical subject in the context sentence than when it was the grammatical object and they used more pronouns when there was no competitor than when there was. They used fewer pronouns and more repeated noun phrases when a visual competitor was present in the scene than when there was no visual competitor. In the absence of an addressee, linguistic context effects were the same as those when an addressee was present, but the visual effect of the competitor disappeared. We conclude that visual salience effects are due to adjustments that speakers make when they produce reference for an addressee, whereas linguistic salience effects appear whether or not speakers have addressees.     

Negation in context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800?ms in the neutral context, 600?ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450?ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated.     

Learning and foraging efficiency in German cockroaches, Blattella germanica (L.) (Insecta: Dictyoptera)

We analysed, under laboratory test conditions, how German cockroach larvae oriented their outgoing foraging trip from their shelter. Our results stressed the importance of external factors, like availability and spatial distribution of food sources, in the choice of a foraging strategy within their home range. When food sources were randomly distributed, larvae adopted a random food search strategy. When food distribution was spatially predictable and reliable, cockroaches were able to relate the presence of food with a landmark during a 3-day training period and to develop an oriented search strategy. Cockroaches were able to associate learned spatial information about their home range to the presence of food resources and then to improve their foraging efficiency. However, conflict experiments revealed that detection of food odour overrode learned landmark cues. Received: 16 October 1999 / Accepted after revision: 18 July 2000