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In the context of a lecture, the capacity to readily recognize and synthesize key concepts is crucial for comprehension and overall educational performance. In this paper, we introduce a tool, the Collaborative Lecture Annotation System (CLAS), which has been developed to make the extraction of important information a more collaborative and engaged process. The system relies on semantically constrained annotation, postannotation data amalgamation and transparent display of this amalgamated data. In addition to describing the CLAS, we report on a user experience study aimed at investigating students' perception of the utility of the tool.

Recent discussions in the literature, along with the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) (American Psychiatric Association 2013), suggest aetiological commonalities between the highly comorbid Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Addressing this discussion requires studying these disorders together by comparing constructs typical to each of them. In the present study, we investigate global processing, known to be difficult for participants with ASD, and Intra-Subject Variability (ISV), known to be consistently increased in participants with ADHD, in groups, aged 10–13 years, with ADHD (n = 25), ASD without comorbid ADHD (ASD-) (n = 13) and ASD with ADHD (ASD+) (n = 18) in comparison with a typically developing group (n = 22). A Copying task, typically requiring global processing and in this case particularly designed using equally complex stimuli to also measure ISV across trials, was selected. Oculomotor measures in this task proved to be particularly sensitive to group differences. While increased ISV was not observed in the present task in participants with ADHD, both ASD groups looked longer on the figure to be drawn, indicating that global processing takes longer in ASD. However, the ASD+ group fixated on the figure only between drawing movements, whereas the ASD- group did this throughout the drawing process. The present study provides evidence towards ASD and ADHD being separate, not-overlapping, disorders. Since the pure ASD- group was affected more by central coherence problems than the ASD+ group, it may suggest that neuropsychological constructs interact differently in different clinical groups and sub-groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A flickering light can be seen during a saccadic eye movement as a pattern of contours known as a phantom array. On repeated pairs of trials, observers made saccades across a narrow (1 arc minutes), bright (10−4 cd/m2) source of flickering light and were required to detect the phantom array. On one of each pair of trials, chosen at random, the light flickered at 60 kHz and on the other at a frequency chosen in the range 1–11 kHz. In two such studies, a few observers were reliably able to discriminate 11 kHz from 60 kHz on the basis of the visibility of the phantom array. The average threshold at which the array was visible was about 6 kHz and therefore double that previously obtained with larger targets. Those observers who were able to see the phantom array tended reliably to report more symptoms of visual discomfort in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human saccades and fixations have numerous functions in complex everyday tasks, which have sometimes been neglected in simple experimental situations. In this review I describe some of the characteristics of eye movement behaviour during real-world interactions with objects, while walking in natural environments and while holding a conversation. When performing real-world actions and walking around the world, we fixate relevant features at critical time points during the task. The eye movements between these fixations are planned and coordinated alongside head and body movements, often occurring a short time before the corresponding action. In social interactions, eye movements are both a mechanism for taking in information (for example, when looking at someone's face or following their gaze) and for signalling one's attention to another person. Thus eye movements are specific to a particular task context and subject to high-level planning and control during everyday actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avoiding distractors is crucial for our daily lives. Load theory argues that high perceptual load facilitates distractor avoidance, while high cognitive load impedes distractor avoidance (see, Lavie, 2005). Difficulty in avoiding distractors is one of the key symptoms of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; APA, 2013). In a series of experiments, we investigated visual attention during the viewing of complex scenes (featuring social and non-social objects), while manipulating Working Memory Load (WM) in a concurrent task. We also explored the relationship between these tasks and ADHD-like traits. Fixations during scene viewing were investigated with reference to objects of high and low saliency with social area (a person) also imbedded in the image. We tested the hypothesis that high WM load would lead to increased capture by the salient distractor. In contrast, attending to the social item might require more top-down resources and so be disrupted by WM load. The pattern of results suggests that during image viewing the social object was fixated to a greater degree than the other object (regardless of salience). While, there was a relationship between the degree of ADHD-like traits and performance on the memory task, WM load did not seem to affect scanning in scenes. Such findings suggest that top-down resources are not needed to attend to a social area in complex stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Endophenotypes are intermediate variables in the hypothetical causal chain from observed behavior of a clinical disorder to its underlying genotype. Recent literature trends point to the potential etiological overlap between Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The present study aims to systematically compare these groups, by studying the potential endophenotypes of ASD (local-global processing; social cueing) and ADHD (Intra-Subject Variability (ISV)) in tandem. Methods: Three tasks, namely visual search, copying down and gaze cueing were administered to directly examine ASD- (ASD without co-morbid ADHD), ADHD and ASD+ (ASD with co-morbid ADHD) groups, in comparison to a typically developing (TD) group (N=100). Step-by-step process analysis and scan-path models were employed to analyze the oculomotor and behavioural data collected. Results: Results from the visual search task show that groups with ADHD symptoms (ADHD and ASD+) have increased intra-subject variability, whereas only the ASD- group showed signs of superior performance. Fixation durations during the copying down task can differentiate ASD- and ADHD groups on the strategies used. The gaze cueing task, shows the ASD+ group to use different strategies as compared to TD, and have slower and more variable saccadic RTs as compared to ADHD and ASD-. Conclusion: The present study gives evidence for a double dissociation between ADHD and ASD when no comorbid symptoms are present, on paradigms of local-global processing and social cueing. Oculomotor paradigms and analysis have successfully teased apart this interaction in the present study and can aid greatly in the quest for these endophenotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale: Peak velocities of saccadic eye movements are reduced after benzodiazepine administration. Even though this is an established effect, past research has only examined it in horizontal prosaccade tasks., Objectives: The spectrum of saccadic eye movements, however, is much larger. Therefore, we aimed to make a first attempt at filling this research gap by testing benzodiazepine effects on saccades under different experimental task conditions., Methods: 1 mg lorazepam or placebo was administered (within-subjects, double-blind, in randomised order) to n = 30 healthy adults. Participants performed an extended version of the prosaccade task, including vertical saccade directions and different stimulus eccentricities, as well as a free viewing task., Results: Results from the prosaccade task confirmed established effects of benzodiazepines as well as saccade direction on saccadic parameters but additionally showed that the drug effect on peak velocity was independent of saccade direction. Remarkably, in the free viewing task peak velocities as well as other saccade parameters were unaffected by lorazepam. Furthermore, exploration patterns during free viewing did not change under lorazepam., Conclusions: Overall, our findings further consolidate the peak velocity of prosaccades as a biomarker of sedation. Additionally, we suggest that sedative effects of low doses of benzodiazepines may be compensated in tasks that more closely resemble natural eye movement behaviour, possibly due to the lack of time constraints or via neurophysiological processes related to volition., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

When free-viewing scenes, participants tend to preferentially fixate social elements (e.g., people). In the present study, we tested whether this bias would be disrupted by increasing the demands of a secondary dual-task: holding a set of (one or six) spatial locations in memory, presented either simultaneously or sequentially. Following a retention interval, participants judged whether a test location was present in the to-be-remembered stimuli. During the retention interval participants free-viewed scenes containing a social element (a person) and a non-social element (an object) that served as regions of interest. In order to assess the impact of physical salience, the non-social element was presented in both an unaltered baseline version, and in a version where its salience was artificially increased. The results showed that the preference to look at social elements decreased when the demands of the spatial memory task were increased from one to six locations, regardless of presentation mode (simultaneous or sequential). The high-load condition also resulted in more central fixations and reduced exploration of the scene. The results indicate that the social prioritisation effect, and scene viewing more generally, can be affected by a concurrent memory load., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Linguistic syntax has often been claimed as uniquely complex due to features like anaphoric relations and distance dependencies. However, visual narratives of sequential images, like those in comics, have been argued to use sequencing mechanisms analogous to those in language. These narrative structures include "refiner" panels that "zoom in" on the contents of another panel. Similar to anaphora in language, refiners indexically connect inexplicit referential information in one unit (refiner, pronoun) to a more informative "antecedent" elsewhere in the discourse. Also like in language, refiners can follow their antecedents (anaphoric) or precede them (cataphoric), along with having either proximal or distant connections. We here explore the constraints on visual narrative refiners created by modulating these features of order and distance. Experiment 1 examined participants' preferences for where refiners are placed in a sequence using a force-choice test, which revealed that refiners are preferred to follow their antecedents and have proximal distances from them. Experiment 2 then showed that distance dependencies lead to slower self-paced viewing times. Finally, measurements of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in Experiment 3 revealed that these patterns evoke similar brain responses as referential dependencies in language (i.e., N400, LAN, Nref). Across all three studies, the constraints and (neuro)cognitive responses to refiners parallel those shown to anaphora in language, suggesting domain-general constraints on the sequencing of referential dependencies., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Individuals high in autistic traits can have difficulty understanding verbal and non-verbal cues, and may display atypical gaze behaviour during social interactions. The aim of this study was to examine differences among neurotypical individuals with high and low levels of autistic traits with regard to their gaze behaviour and their ability to assess peers' social status accurately. Fifty-four university students who completed the 10-item Autism Quotient (AQ-10) were eye-tracked as they watched six 20-second video clips of people ("targets") involved in a group decision-making task. Simulating natural, everyday social interactions, the video clips included moments of debate, humour, interruptions, and cross talk. Results showed that high-scorers on the AQ-10 (i.e., those with more autistic traits) did not differ from the low-scorers in either gaze behaviour or assessing the targets' relative social status. The results based on this neurotypical group of participants suggest that the ability of individuals high in autistic traits to read social cues may be preserved in certain tasks crucial to navigating day-to-day social relationships. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theory of mind, weak central coherence, and social motivation theories of autism., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Forby et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Autism Spectrum Disorder is characterised by profound challenges with social communication and social interaction. Currently, there are few therapeutic interventions that successfully target some of the functionally impairing traits associated with autism. Furthermore, many of these interventions comprise a variety of limitations; including, limited accessibility, extensive durations, or the requirement of a trained professional to deliver the intervention. New research suggests that instead of targeting all traits associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder with a single solution, scientific research should focus on providing therapeutic tools that alleviate functionally impairing facets specific to the individual. Owing to the nature of physical activity, sports, and dance (coordinated movement) these activities could provide opportunities to enhance communication skills and social development in autistic children. Therefore, this paper gives a narrative overview of the literature surrounding communication and coordinated movement; outlining what is meant by communication challenges, exploring the benefits of coordinated movement for traits associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and delineating how coordinated movement elicits positive outcomes for autistic children., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Crown Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In this paper, we present a review of how the various aspects of any study using an eye tracker (such as the instrument, methodology, environment, participant, etc.) affect the quality of the recorded eye-tracking data and the obtained eye-movement and gaze measures. We take this review to represent the empirical foundation for reporting guidelines of any study involving an eye tracker. We compare this empirical foundation to five existing reporting guidelines and to a database of 207 published eye-tracking studies. We find that reporting guidelines vary substantially and do not match with actual reporting practices. We end by deriving a minimal, flexible reporting guideline based on empirical research (Section "An empirically based minimal reporting guideline")., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

We report two experiments investigating the effect of working memory (WM) load on selective attention. Experiment 1 was a modified version of Lavie et al. and confirmed that increasing memory load disrupted performance in the classic flanker task. Experiment 2 used the same manipulation of WM load to probe attention during the viewing of complex scenes while also investigating individual differences in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits. In the image-viewing task, we measured the degree to which fixations targeted each of two crucial objects: (1) a social object (a person in the scene) and (2) a non-social object of higher or lower physical salience. We compared the extent to which increasing WM load would change the pattern of viewing of the physically salient and socially salient objects. If attending to the social item requires greater default voluntary top-down resources, then the viewing of social objects should show stronger modulation by WM load compared with viewing of physically salient objects. The results showed that the social object was fixated to a greater degree than the other object (regardless of physical salience). Increased salience drew fixations away from the background leading to slightly increased fixations on the non-social object, without changing fixations on the social object. Increased levels of ADHD-like traits were associated with fewer fixations on the social object, but only in the high-salient, low-load condition. Importantly, WM load did not affect the number of fixations on the social object. Such findings suggest rather surprisingly that attending to a social area in complex stimuli is not dependent on the availability of voluntary top-down resources.

Compositionality is a primary feature of language, but graphics can also create combinatorial meaning, like with items above faces (e.g., lightbulbs to mean inspiration). We posit that these "upfixes" (i.e., upwards affixes) involve a productive schema enabling both stored and novel face-upfix dyads. In two experiments, participants viewed either conventional (e.g., lightbulb) or unconventional (e.g., clover-leaves) upfixes with faces which either matched (e.g., lightbulb/smile) or mismatched (e.g., lightbulb/frown). In Experiment 1, matching dyads sponsored higher comprehensibility ratings and faster response times, modulated by conventionality. In Experiment 2, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) revealed conventional upfixes, regardless of matching, evoked larger N250s, indicating perceptual expertise, but mismatching and unconventional dyads elicited larger semantic processing costs (N400) than conventional-matching dyads. Yet mismatches evoked a late negativity, suggesting congruent novel dyads remained construable compared with violations. These results support that combinatorial graphics involve a constrained productive schema, similar to the lexicon of language., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

The presence of other people, whether real or implied, can have a profound impact on our behaviour. However, it is argued that autistic individuals show decreased interest in social phenomena, which leads to an absence of these effects. In this study, the agency of a cue was manipulated such that the cue was either described as representing a computer program or the eye movements of another participant. Both neurotypical and autistic participants demonstrated a social facilitation effect and were significantly more accurate on a prediction task when they believed the cue represented another participant. This demonstrates that whilst autistic adults may show difficulties in interpreting social behaviour this does not necessarily arise from a lack of sensitivity to social agency., (© 2020. The Author(s).)

People are drawn to social, animate things more than inanimate objects. Previous research has also shown gaze following in humans, a process that has been linked to theory of mind (ToM). In three experiments, we investigated whether animacy and ToM are involved when making judgements about the location of a cursor in a scene. In Experiment 1, participants were told that this cursor represented the gaze of an observer and were asked to decide whether the observer was looking at a target object. This task is similar to that carried out by researchers manually coding eye-tracking data. The results showed that participants were biased to perceive the gaze cursor as directed towards animate objects (faces) compared to inanimate objects. In Experiments 2 and 3 we tested the role of ToM, by presenting the same scenes to new participants but now with the statement that the cursor was generated by a 'random' computer system or by a computer system designed to seek targets. The bias to report that the cursor was directed toward faces was abolished in Experiment 2, and minimised in Experiment 3. Together, the results indicate that people attach minds to the mere representation of an individual's gaze, and this attribution of mind influences what people believe an individual is looking at., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

Introduction: The coronavirus pandemic has swept across the United Kingdom (UK). Given the ever-evolving situation, little is known about the repercussions of coronavirus and the subsequent lockdowns for children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Therefore, this study explores the social-communicative impact of the first lockdown (March 2020 - July 2020) in the UK and the return to school period (September 2020 - October 2020), following prolonged disruption to routine, in children diagnosed with ASD. Methods : Parents of autistic children completed 2 separate online surveys following the first lockdown in the UK ( n  = 176) and also when children returned to school following the summer break ( n  = 54). Results : The results suggested that self-regulation skills ( p < .05) and co-operation skills ( p < .05) were most affected over the course of the lockdown. Children's physical activity levels were perceived to significantly increase during the return to school ( p < .0001), which was associated with better social-communication outcomes ( p < .05). Conclusion : Future work is needed to confirm and explore the findings. Such work could be implemented to protect and improve the social-communicative outcomes of autistic children., Competing Interests: All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript., (© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)

The comprehension of visual narratives requires paying attention to certain elements and integrating them across a sequence of images. To study this process, we developed a new approach that modified comic strips according to where observers looked while viewing each sequence. Across three self-paced experiments, we presented sequences of six panels that were sometimes automatically "zoomed-in" or re-framed in order to highlight parts of the image that had been fixated by another group of observers. Fixation zoom panels were rated as easier to understand and produced viewing times more similar to the original comic than panels modified to contain non-fixated or incongruous regions. When a single panel depicting the start of an action was cropped to show only the most fixated region, viewing times were similar to the original narrative despite the reduced information. Modifying such panels also had an impact on the viewing time on subsequent panels, both when zoomed in and when regions were highlighted through an "inset" panel. These findings demonstrate that fixations in a visual narrative are guided to informative elements, and that these elements influence both the current panel and the processing of the sequence.

Visual narratives like comics and films often shift between showing full scenes and close, zoomed-in viewpoints. These zooms are similar to the "spotlight of attention" cast across a visual scene in perception. We here measured ERPs to visual narratives (comic strips) that used zoomed-in and full-scene panels either throughout the whole sequence context or at specific critical panels. Zoomed-in panels were automatically generated on the basis of fixations from prior participants' eye movements to the crucial content of panels (Foulsham & Cohn, 2020). We found that these fixation panels evoked a smaller N300 than full-scenes, indicative of reduced cost for object identification, but that they also evoked a slightly larger amplitude N400 response, suggesting a greater cost for accessing semantic memory with constrained content. Panels in sequences where fixation panels persisted across all positions of the sequence also evoked larger posterior P600s, implying that constrained views required more updating or revision processes throughout the sequence. Altogether, these findings suggest that constraining a visual scene to its crucial parts triggers various processes related not only to the density of its information but also to its integration into a sequential context., (Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Research investigating gaze in natural scenes has identified a number of spatial biases in where people look, but it is unclear whether these are partly due to constrained testing environments (e.g., a participant with their head restrained and looking at a landscape image framed within a computer monitor). We examined the extent to which image shape (square vs. circle), image rotation, and image content (landscapes vs. fractal images) influence eye and head movements in virtual reality (VR). Both the eyes and head were tracked while observers looked at natural scenes in a virtual environment. In line with previous work, we found a bias for saccade directions parallel to the image horizon, regardless of image shape or content. We found that, when allowed to do so, observers move both their eyes and head to explore images. Head rotation, however, was idiosyncratic; some observers rotated a lot, whereas others did not. Interestingly, the head rotated in line with the rotation of landscape but not fractal images. That head rotation and gaze direction respond differently to image content suggests that they may be under different control systems. We discuss our findings in relation to current theories on head and eye movement control and how insights from VR might inform more traditional eye-tracking studies.

Purpose: The influence of interdependency between competitors on pacing decision-making and information-seeking behavior has been explored. This has been done by only altering instructions, and thereby action possibilities, while controlling environment (i.e., competitor behavior) and exercise task., Methods: Twelve participants performed a 4-km time trial on a Velotron cycle ergometer in a randomized, counterbalanced order alone with no virtual opponent (NO), against a virtual opponent with no restrictions (low athlete-opponent interdependency [OP-IND]), or against a virtual opponent who the participant was permitted to overtake only once during the trial (high athlete-opponent interdependency [OP-DEP]). Information-seeking behavior was evaluated using an SMI eye tracker. Differences in pacing, performance, and information-seeking behavior were examined using repeated-measures ANOVA (P < 0.05)., Results: Neither mean power output (NO, 298 ± 35 W; OP-IND, 297 ± 38 W; OP-DEP, 296 ± 37 W) nor finishing time (NO, 377.7 ± 17.4 s; OP-IND, 379.3 ± 19.5 s; OP-DEP, 378.5 ± 17.7 s) differed between experimental conditions. However, power output was lower in the first kilometer of OP-DEP compared with the other experimental conditions (NO, 332 ± 59 W; OP-IND, 325 ± 62 W; OP-DEP, 316 ± 58 W; both P < 0.05), and participants decided to wait longer before they overtook their opponent (OP-IND, 137 ± 130 s; OP-DEP, 255 ± 107 s; P = 0.040). Moreover, total fixation time spent on the avatar of the virtual opponent increased when participants were only allowed to overtake once (OP-IND, 23.3 ± 16.6 s; OP-DEP, 55.8 ± 32.7 s; P = 0.002)., Conclusion: A higher interdependency between athlete and opponent altered pacing behavior in terms of in-race adaptations based on opponent's behavior, and it induced an increased attentional focus on the virtual opponent. Thus, in the context of exercise regulation, attentional cues are likely to be used in an adaptive way according to their availability and situational relevance, consistent with a decision-making framework based on the interdependence of perception and action.

Social attention describes how observers orient to social information and exhibit behaviors such as gaze following. These behaviors are examples of how attentional orienting may differ when in the presence of other people, although they have typically been studied without actual social presence. In the present study we ask whether orienting, as measured by head and eye movements, will change when participants are trying to mislead or hide their attention from a bystander. In two experiments, observers performed a preference task while being video-recorded, and subsequent participants were asked to guess the response of the participant based on a video of the head and upper body. In a second condition, observers were told to try to mislead the "guesser". The results showed that participants' preference responses could be guessed from videos of the head and, critically, that participants spontaneously changed their orienting behavior in order to mislead by reducing the rate at which they made large head movements. Masking the eyes with sunglasses suggested that head movements were most important in our setup. This indicates that head and eye movements can be used flexibly according to the socio-communicative context.

The eyes are preferentially attended over other facial features and recent evidence suggests this bias is difficult to suppress. To further examine the automatic and volitional nature of this bias for eye information, we used a novel prompting face recognition paradigm in 41 adults and measured the location of their first fixations, overall dwell time and behavioural responses. First, patterns of eye gaze were measured during a free-viewing forced choice face recognition paradigm. Second, the task was repeated but with prompts to look to either the eyes or the mouth. Participants showed significantly more first fixations to the eyes than mouth, both when prompted to look at the eyes and when prompted to look at the mouth. The pattern of looking to the eyes when prompted was indistinguishable from the unprompted condition in which participants were free to look where they chose. Notably, the dwell time data demonstrated that the eye bias did not persist over the entire presentation period. Our results suggest a difficult-to-inhibit bias to initially orient to the eyes, which is superseded by volitional, top-down control of eye gaze. Further, the amount of looking to the eyes is at a maximum level spontaneously and cannot be enhanced by explicit instructions., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: Past research finds that treatment evaluations are more negative when risks are presented after benefits. This study investigates this order effect: manipulating tabular orientation and order of risk-benefit information, and examining information search order and gaze duration via eye-tracking., Design: 108 (Study 1) and 44 (Study 2) participants viewed information about treatment risks and benefits, in either a horizontal (left-right) or vertical (above-below) orientation, with the benefits or risks presented first (left side or at top). For 4 scenarios, participants answered 6 treatment evaluation questions (1-7 scales) that were combined into overall evaluation scores. In addition, Study 2 collected eye-tracking data during the benefit-risk presentation., Results: Participants tended to read one set of information (i.e., all risks or all benefits) before transitioning to the other. Analysis of order of fixations showed this tendency was stronger in the vertical (standardized mean rank difference further from 0, M = ± .88) than horizontal orientation ( M = ± 0.71). Approximately 50% of the time was spent reading benefits when benefits were shown first, but this was reduced to ~40% when risks were presented first (regression coefficient: B = -4.52, p < .001). Eye-tracking measures did not strongly predict treatment evaluations, although time percentage reading benefits positively predicted evaluation when holding other variables constant ( B = 0.02, p = .023)., Conclusion: These results highlight the impact of seemingly arbitrary design choices on inspection order. For instance, presenting risks where they will be seen first leads to relatively less time spent considering treatment benefits. Other research suggests these changes to inspection order can influence multi-option and multi-attribute choices, and represent an area for future research.

More and more researchers are considering the omnibus eye movement sequence-the scanpath-in their studies of visual and cognitive processing (e.g. Hayes, Petrov, & Sederberg, 2011; Madsen, Larson, Loschky, & Rebello, 2012; Ni et al., 2011; von der Malsburg & Vasishth, 2011). However, it remains unclear how recent methods for comparing scanpaths perform in experiments producing variable scanpaths, and whether these methods supplement more traditional analyses of individual oculomotor statistics. We address this problem for MultiMatch (Jarodzka et al., 2010; Dewhurst et al., 2012), evaluating its performance with a visual search-like task in which participants must fixate a series of target numbers in a prescribed order. This task should produce predictable sequences of fixations and thus provide a testing ground for scanpath measures. Task difficulty was manipulated by making the targets more or less visible through changes in font and the presence of distractors or visual noise. These changes in task demands led to slower search and more fixations. Importantly, they also resulted in a reduction in the between-subjects scanpath similarity, demonstrating that participants' gaze patterns became more heterogenous in terms of saccade length and angle, and fixation position. This implies a divergent strategy or random component to eye-movement behaviour which increases as the task becomes more difficult. Interestingly, the duration of fixations along aligned vectors showed the opposite pattern, becoming more similar between observers in 2 of the 3 difficulty manipulations. This provides important information for vision scientists who may wish to use scanpath metrics to quantify variations in gaze across a spectrum of perceptual and cognitive tasks., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

When observers view an image, their initial eye movements are not equally distributed but instead are often biased to the left of the picture. This pattern has been linked to pseudoneglect, the spatial bias to the left that is observed in line bisection and a range of other perceptual and attentional tasks. Pseudoneglect is often explained according to the dominance of the right-hemisphere in the neural control of attention, a view bolstered by differences between left- and right-handed participants in both line bisection and eye movements. We re-examined this observation in eighty participants (half of whom reported being left handed) who completed a computerised line bisection task and viewed a series of images. We failed to replicate the previously-reported effect of handedness on eye movements in image viewing, with both groups showing a large average bias to the left on the first saccade. While there was a modest effect of handedness on line bisection, there was no correlation between the two tasks. Stable individual differences, as well as a shorter latency on the initial saccade, were robust predictors of an initial saccade to the left. Therefore, while there seems to be a reflexive and idiosyncratic drive to look to the left, it is not well accounted for by handedness and may have different mechanisms from other forms of pseudoneglect., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: To use eye-tracking technology to directly compare information acquisition behavior of experienced and novice cyclists during a self-paced, 10-mile (16.1 km) time trial (TT)., Method: Two groups of novice (n = 10) and experienced cyclists (n = 10) performed a 10-mile self-paced TT on two separate occasions during which a number of feedback variables (speed, distance, power output, cadence, HR, and time) were projected within their view. A large RPE scale was also presented next to the projected information and participants. Participants were fitted with a head-mounted eye tracker and HR monitor., Results: Experienced cyclists performed both TT quicker than novices (F1,18 = 6.8, P = 0.018) during which they primarily looked at speed (9 of 10 participants), whereas novices primarily looked at distance (6 of 10 participants). Experienced cyclists looked at primary information for longer than novices across the whole TT (24.5% ± 4.2% vs 34.2% ± 6.1%; t18 = 4.2; P < 0.001) and less frequently than novices during the last quarter of the TT (49 ± 19 vs 80 ± 32; t18 = -2.6; P = 0.009). The most common combination of primary and secondary information looked at by experienced cyclists was speed and distance, respectively. Looking at 10 different primary-secondary feedback permutations, the novices were less consistent than the experienced cyclists in their information acquisition behavior., Conclusions: This study challenges the importance placed on knowledge of the endpoint to pacing in previous models, especially for experienced cyclists for whom distance feedback was looked at secondary to, but in conjunction with, information about speed. Novice cyclists have a greater dependence on distance feedback, which they look at for shorter and more frequent periods than the experienced cyclists. Experienced cyclists are more selective and consistent in attention to feedback during TT cycling.

Research has demonstrated that how "cute" an infant is perceived to be has consequences for caregiving. Infants with facial abnormalities receive lower ratings of cuteness, but relatively little is known about how different abnormalities and their location affect these aesthetic judgements. The objective of the current study was to compare the impact of different abnormalities on the perception of infant faces, while controlling for infant identity. In two experiments, adult participants gave ratings of cuteness and attractiveness in response to face images that had been edited to introduce common facial abnormalities. Stimulus faces displayed either a haemangioma (a small, benign birth mark), strabismus (an abnormal alignment of the eyes) or a cleft lip (an abnormal opening in the upper lip). In Experiment 1, haemangioma had less of a detrimental effect on ratings than the more severe abnormalities. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the position of a haemangioma on the face. We found small but robust effects of this position, with abnormalities in the top and on the left of the face receiving lower cuteness ratings. This is consistent with previous research showing that people attend more to the top of the face (particularly the eyes) and to the left hemifield.

Research investigating scene perception normally involves laboratory experiments using static images. Much has been learned about how observers look at pictures of the real world and the attentional mechanisms underlying this behaviour. However, the use of static, isolated pictures as a proxy for studying everyday attention in real environments has led to the criticism that such experiments are artificial. We report a new study that tests the extent to which the real world can be reduced to simpler laboratory stimuli. We recorded the gaze of participants walking on a university campus with a mobile eye tracker, and then showed static frames from this walk to new participants, in either a random or sequential order. The aim was to compare the gaze of participants walking in the real environment with fixations on pictures of the same scene. The data show that picture order affects interobserver fixation consistency and changes looking patterns. Critically, while fixations on the static images overlapped significantly with the actual real-world eye movements, they did so no more than a model that assumed a general bias to the centre. Remarkably, a model that simply takes into account where the eyes are normally positioned in the head-independent of what is actually in the scene-does far better than any other model. These data reveal that viewing patterns to static scenes are a relatively poor proxy for predicting real world eye movement behaviour, while raising intriguing possibilities for how to best measure attention in everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

In the natural environment, visual selection is accomplished by a system of nested effectors, moving the head and body within space and the eyes within the visual field. However, it is not yet known if the principles of selection for these different effectors are the same or different. We used a novel gaze-contingent display in which an asymmetric window of visibility (a horizontal or vertical slot) was yoked to either head or eye position. Participants showed highly systematic changes in behaviour, revealing clear differences in the principles underlying selection by eye and head. Eye movements were more likely to move in the direction of visible information-horizontally when viewing with a horizontal slot, and vertically with a vertical slot. Head movements showed the opposite and complementary pattern, moving to reveal new information (e.g. vertically with a horizontal slot and vice versa). These results are consistent with a nested system in which the head favours exploration of unknown regions, while the eye exploits what can be seen with finer-scale saccades.

Purpose: In recent years there has been an increase in evidence for the functional and psychosocial benefits of correcting strabismus/heterotropia in adults. This study aimed to establish whether there has been an associated change in the frequency of strabismus surgery performed on adults in England since 2000., Methods: Data on strabismus surgery performed in England between 2000 and 2014 were obtained from Hospital Episode Statistics, Health and Social Care Information Centre, England. The frequency of strabismus surgery was analysed for different age groups. Data were considered in the context of total population data for England, obtained from the Office for National Statistics., Results: There was little change in the total number of strabismus operations performed in 2000-2014 (1% reduction). In the same period the number of operations performed on children aged 0-15 years decreased by 17%. In contrast, there was a 24% increase in the number of strabismus operations performed on patients aged 15 years or older., Conclusions: Although strabismus surgery is still most commonly performed on children, the data show there has been a significant increase in the number of strabismus operations performed on adults. We speculate that this increase is connected to the growing weight of evidence detailing the functional and psychosocial consequences of strabismus and the benefits of correction. These results have potential implications for the delivery of future care., (© 2016 The Authors Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics © 2016 The College of Optometrists.)

Social attention is thought to require detecting the eyes of others and following their gaze. To be effective, observers must also be able to infer the person's thoughts and feelings about what he or she is looking at, but this has only rarely been investigated in laboratory studies. In this study, participants' eye movements were recorded while they chose which of four patterns they preferred. New observers were subsequently able to reliably guess the preference response by watching a replay of the fixations. Moreover, when asked to mislead the person guessing, participants changed their looking behavior and guessing success was reduced. In a second experiment, naïve participants could also guess the preference of the original observers but were unable to identify trials which were lies. These results confirm that people can spontaneously use the gaze of others to infer their judgments, but also that these inferences are open to deception., (Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)

Cognitive scientists have long been interested in the role that eye gaze plays in social interactions. Previous research suggests that gaze acts as a signaling mechanism and can be used to control turn-taking behaviour. However, early research on this topic employed methods of analysis that aggregated gaze information across an entire trial (or trials), which masks any temporal dynamics that may exist in social interactions. More recently, attempts have been made to understand the temporal characteristics of social gaze but little research has been conducted in a natural setting with two interacting participants. The present study combines a temporally sensitive analysis technique with modern eye tracking technology to 1) validate the overall results from earlier aggregated analyses and 2) provide insight into the specific moment-to-moment temporal characteristics of turn-taking behaviour in a natural setting. Dyads played two social guessing games (20 Questions and Heads Up) while their eyes were tracked. Our general results are in line with past aggregated data, and using cross-correlational analysis on the specific gaze and speech signals of both participants we found that 1) speakers end their turn with direct gaze at the listener and 2) the listener in turn begins to speak with averted gaze. Convergent with theoretical models of social interaction, our data suggest that eye gaze can be used to signal both the end and the beginning of a speaking turn during a social interaction. The present study offers insight into the temporal dynamics of live dyadic interactions and also provides a new method of analysis for eye gaze data when temporal relationships are of interest.

We recently reported that people who wear an eye tracker modify their natural looking behaviour in a prosocial manner. This change in looking behaviour represents a potential concern for researchers who wish to use eye trackers to understand the functioning of human attention. On the other hand, it may offer a real boon to manufacturers and consumers of wearable computing (e.g., Google Glass), for if wearable computing causes people to behave in a prosocial manner, then the public's fear that people with wearable computing will invade their privacy is unfounded. Critically, both of these divergent implications are grounded on the assumption that the prosocial behavioural effect of wearing an eye tracker is sustained for a prolonged period of time. Our study reveals that on the very first wearing of an eye tracker, and in less than 10 min, the prosocial effect of an eye tracker is abolished, but by drawing attention back to the eye tracker, the implied presence effect is easily reactivated. This suggests that eye trackers induce a transient social presence effect, which is rendered dormant when attention is shifted away from the source of implied presence. This is good news for researchers who use eye trackers to measure attention and behaviour; and could be bad news for advocates of wearable computing in everyday life., (© 2014 The British Psychological Society.)

Researchers have investigated visual search behavior for almost a century. During that time, few studies have examined the cognitive processes involved in hiding items rather than finding them. To investigate this, we developed a paradigm that allowed participants to indicate where they would hide (or find) an item that was to be found (or hidden) by a friend or a foe. We found that (i) for friends more than foes, participants selected the pop-out item in the display, and (ii) when the display was homogeneous, they selected nearby and corner items. These behaviors held for both hiding and finding, although hide and find behaviors were not identical. For pop-out displays, decision times were unusually long when hiding an item from a foe. These data converge on the conclusion that the principles of search and concealment are similar, but not the same. They also suggest that this paradigm will provide researchers a powerful method for investigating theory of mind in adults.

Visual search has been studied intensively in the labouratory, but lab search often differs from search in the real world in many respects. Here, we used a mobile eye tracker to record the gaze of participants engaged in a realistic, active search task. Participants were asked to walk into a mailroom and locate a target mailbox among many similar mailboxes. This procedure allowed control of bottom-up cues (by making the target mailbox more salient; Experiment 1) and top-down instructions (by informing participants about the cue; Experiment 2). The bottom-up salience of the target had no effect on the overall time taken to search for the target, although the salient target was more likely to be fixated and found once it was within the central visual field. Top-down knowledge of target appearance had a larger effect, reducing the need for multiple head and body movements, and meaning that the target was fixated earlier and from further away. Although there remains much to be discovered in complex real-world search, this study demonstrates that principles from visual search in the labouratory influence gaze in natural behaviour, and provides a bridge between these labouratory studies and research examining vision in natural tasks.

Viewing position effects are commonly observed in reading, but they have only rarely been investigated in object perception or in the realistic context of a natural scene. In two experiments, we explored where people fixate within photorealistic objects and the effects of this landing position on recognition and subsequent eye movements. The results demonstrate an optimal viewing position-objects are processed more quickly when fixation is in the centre of the object. Viewers also prefer to saccade to the centre of objects within a natural scene, even when making a large saccade. A central landing position is associated with an increased likelihood of making a refixation, a result that differs from previous reports and suggests that multiple fixations within objects, within scenes, occur for a range of reasons. These results suggest that eye movements within scenes are systematic and are made with reference to an early parsing of the scene into constituent objects.

When people read, their thoughts sometimes drift away from the task at hand: They are "mind wandering." Recent research suggests that this change in task focus is reflected in eye movements and this was tested in an experiment using controlled stimuli. Participants were presented with a series of sentences containing high- and low-frequency words, which they read while being eye-tracked, and they were sometimes probed to indicate whether they were on task or mind wandering. The results showed multiple differences between reading prior to a mind-wandering response and reading when on task: Mind wandering led to slower reading times, longer average fixation duration, and an absence of the word frequency effect on gaze duration. Collectively, these findings confirm that task focus could be inferred from eye movements, and they indicate that the link between word identification and eye scanning is decoupled when the mind wanders.

Animals, including dogs, dolphins, monkeys and man, follow gaze. What mediates this bias towards the eyes? One hypothesis is that primates possess a distinct neural module that is uniquely tuned for the eyes of others. An alternative explanation is that configural face processing drives fixations to the middle of peoples' faces, which is where the eyes happen to be located. We distinguish between these two accounts. Observers were presented with images of people, non-human creatures with eyes in the middle of their faces (`humanoids') or creatures with eyes positioned elsewhere (`monsters'). There was a profound and significant bias towards looking early and often at the eyes of humans and humanoids and also, critically, at the eyes of monsters. These findings demonstrate that the eyes, and not the middle of the head, are being targeted by the oculomotor system.

Many modern theories propose that perceptual information is represented by the sensorimotor activity elicited by the original stimulus. Scanpath theory (Noton & Stark, 1971) predicts that reinstating a sequence of eye fixations will help an observer recognize a previously seen image. However, the only studies to investigate this are correlational ones based on calculating scanpath similarity. We therefore describe a series of 5 experiments that constrain the fixations during encoding or recognition of images in order to manipulate scanpath similarity. Participants encoded a set of images and later had to recognize those that they had seen. They spontaneously selected regions that they had fixated during encoding (Experiment 1), and this was a predictor of recognition accuracy. Yoking the parts of the image available at recognition to the encoded scanpath led to better memory performance than randomly selected image regions (Experiment 2), and this could not be explained by the spatial distribution of locations (Experiment 3). However, there was no recognition advantage for re-viewing one's own fixations versus someone else's (Experiment 4) or for retaining their serial order (Experiment 5). Therefore, although it is beneficial to look at encoded regions, there is no evidence that scanpaths are stored or that scanpath recapitulation is functional in scene memory. This paradigm provides a controlled way of studying the integration of scene content, spatial structure, and oculomotor signals, with consequences for the perception, representation, and retrieval of visual information., (2013 APA, all rights reserved)

A bias for humans to attend to the left side of space has been reported in a variety of experiments. While patients with hemispatial neglect mistakenly bisect horizontal lines to the right of centre, neurologically healthy individuals show a mean leftward error. Here, two experiments demonstrated a robust tendency for participants to saccade to the left when viewing photographs. We were able to manipulate this bias by using an asymmetrical gaze-contingent window, which revealed more of the scene on one side of fixation-causing participants to saccade more often in that direction. A second experiment demonstrated the same change in eye movements occurring rapidly from trial to trial, and investigated whether it would carry over and effect attention during a line bisection task. There was some carry-over from gaze-contingent scene viewing to the eye movements during line bisection. However, despite frequent initial eye movements and many errors to the left, manual responses were not affected by this change in orienting. We conclude that the mechanisms underlying asymmetrical attention in picture scanning and line bisection are flexible and can be separated, with saccades in scene perception driven more by a skewed perceptual span., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

We are often not explicitly aware of the location of our spatial attention, despite its influence on our perception and cognition. During a picture memory task, we asked whether people could later recognise their eye fixations in a two-alternative test. In three separate experiments, participants performed above chance when discriminating their own fixation patterns from random locations or locations fixated in a different image. Recognition was much poorer when the task was to spot your own versus someone else's fixations on the same stimulus, but performance remained better than chance. That we are sensitive to our own scan patterns has implications for perception, memory, and meta-cognition.

Social understanding is facilitated by effectively attending to other people and the subtle social cues they generate. In order to more fully appreciate the nature of social attention and what drives people to attend to social aspects of the world, one must investigate the factors that influence social attention. This is especially important when attempting to create models of disordered social attention, e.g. a model of social attention in autism. Here we analysed participants' viewing behaviour during one-to-one social interactions with an experimenter. Interactions were conducted either live or via video (social presence manipulation). The participant was asked and then required to answer questions. Experimenter eye-contact was either direct or averted. Additionally, the influence of participant self-reported autistic traits was also investigated. We found that regardless of whether the interaction was conducted live or via a video, participants frequently looked at the experimenter's face, and they did this more often when being asked a question than when answering. Critical differences in social attention between the live and video interactions were also observed. Modifications of experimenter eye contact influenced participants' eye movements in the live interaction only; and increased autistic traits were associated with less looking at the experimenter for video interactions only. We conclude that analysing patterns of eye-movements in response to strictly controlled video stimuli and natural real-world stimuli furthers the field's understanding of the factors that influence social attention.

The pursuit of social rank is a recurrent and pervasive challenge faced by individuals in all human societies. Yet, the precise means through which individuals compete for social standing remains unclear. In 2 studies, we investigated the impact of 2 fundamental strategies-Dominance (the use of force and intimidation to induce fear) and Prestige (the sharing of expertise or know-how to gain respect)-on the attainment of social rank, which we conceptualized as the acquisition of (a) perceived influence over others (Study 1), (b) actual influence over others' behaviors (Study 1), and (c) others' visual attention (Study 2). Study 1 examined the process of hierarchy formation among a group of previously unacquainted individuals, who provided round-robin judgments of each other after completing a group task. Results indicated that the adoption of either a Dominance or Prestige strategy promoted perceptions of greater influence, by both group members and outside observers, and higher levels of actual influence, based on a behavioral measure. These effects were not driven by popularity; in fact, those who adopted a Prestige strategy were viewed as likable, whereas those who adopted a Dominance strategy were not well liked. In Study 2, participants viewed brief video clips of group interactions from Study 1 while their gaze was monitored with an eye tracker. Dominant and Prestigious targets each received greater visual attention than targets low on either dimension. Together, these findings demonstrate that Dominance and Prestige are distinct yet viable strategies for ascending the social hierarchy, consistent with evolutionary theory.