Eye movements as predictors of student experiences during nursing simulation learning events.

Although the "eye-mind link" hypothesis posits that eye movements provide a direct window into cognitive processing, linking eye movements to specific cognitions in real-world settings remains challenging. This challenge may arise because gaze metrics such as fixation duration, pupil size, and saccade amplitude are often aggregated across timelines that include heterogeneous events. To address this, we tested whether aggregating gaze parameters across participant-defined events could support the hypothesis that increased focal processing, indicated by greater gaze duration and pupil diameter, and decreased scene exploration, indicated by smaller saccade amplitude, would predict effective task performance.

The roles of cognitive dissonance and normative reasoning in attributions of minds to robots.

As a wide variety of intelligent technologies become part of everyday life, researchers have explored how people conceptualize agents that in some ways act and think like living things but are clearly machines. Much of this work draws upon the idea that people readily default to generalizing human-like properties to such agents, and only pare back on these generalizations with added thought. However, recent findings have also documented that people are sometimes initially hesitant to attribute minds to a machine but are more willing to do so with additional thought.

Evidence for an event-integration window: A cognitive temporal window supports flexible integration of multimodal events.

Just as the perception of simple events such as clapping hands requires a linkage of sound with movements that produce the sound, the integration of more complex events such as describing how to give an injection requires a linkage between the instructor's utterances and their actions. However, the mechanism for integrating these complex multimodal events is unclear. For example, it is possible that predictive temporal relationships are important for multimodal event understanding, but it is also possible that this form of understanding arises more from meaningful causal between-event links that are temporally unspecified.

Video speeding can be efficient and speeding-induced preference cost can be lessened by selective speeding.

Over the past decade, screen-captured instructional videos have become popular tools for learning. Viewers wanting to learn efficiently can play these videos at faster-than-normal speeds, a feature offered by hosting services such as YouTube. Although previous research suggests that moderate speeding may not lessen learning, little research has tested this form of media for speeding-induced learning impairments.

The Incomplete Tyranny of Dynamic Stimuli: Gaze Similarity Predicts Response Similarity in Screen-Captured Instructional Videos.

Although eye tracking has been used extensively to assess cognitions for static stimuli, recent research suggests that the link between gaze and cognition may be more tenuous for dynamic stimuli such as videos. Part of the difficulty in convincingly linking gaze with cognition is that in dynamic stimuli, gaze position is strongly influenced by exogenous cues such as object motion. However, tests of the gaze-cognition link in dynamic stimuli have been done on only a limited range of stimuli often characterized by highly organized motion.

Efficient calculations of NSS-based gaze similarity for time-dependent stimuli.

The degree of spatial similarity between the gaze of participants viewing dynamic stimuli such as videos has been previously measured using metrics which are based on the NSS (Normalized Scanpath Saliency). Methods currently used to calculate this metric rely upon a numerical grid, which can be computationally prohibitive for a variety of otherwise useful applications such as Monte Carlo analyses. In the present work we derive a new analytical calculation method for the same metric that yields equal or more accurate results, but with speeds than can be orders of magnitude faster (depending on parameters).

The interrelationship between concepts about agency and students' use of teachable-agent learning technology.

To successfully interact with software agents, people must call upon basic concepts about goals and intentionality and strategically deploy these concepts in a range of circumstances where specific entailments may or may not apply. We hypothesize that people who can effectively deploy agency concepts in new situations will be more effective in interactions with software agents. Further, we posit that interacting with a software agent can itself refine a person's deployment of agency concepts.

Audio Facilitates the Perception of Cinematic Continuity by First-Time Viewers.

Previous studies concluded that first-time film viewers often had difficulty integrating shots into a coherent representation of the depicted events in the absence of a familiar action through the film cuts or a salient eye-gazing of a character in the film. In this study, we investigated whether diegetic sound (i.e.

Bridging views in cinema: a review of the art and science of view integration.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the relationship between film and cognitive science. This is reflected in a new science of cinema that can help us both to understand this art form, and to produce new insights about cognition and perception. In this review, we begin by describing how the initial development of cinema involved close observation of audience response.

Hearing in color: How expectations distort perception of skin tone.

Previous research has found that the perceived brightness of a face can be distorted by the social category of race. Thus, Levin and Banaji (2006) found, in a U.S.

The Face-Race Lightness Illusion Is Not Driven by Low-level Stimulus Properties: An Empirical Reply to Firestone and Scholl (2014).

Levin and Banaji (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 501-512, 2006) reported a lightness illusion in which participants appeared to perceive Black faces to be darker than White faces, even though the faces were matched for overall brightness and contrast. Recently, this finding was challenged by Firestone and Scholl (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2014), who argued that the nominal illusion remained even when the faces were blurred so as to make their race undetectable, and concluded that uncontrolled perceptual differences between the stimulus faces drove at least some observations of the original distortion effect. In this paper we report that measures of race perception used by Firestone and Scholl were insufficiently sensitive.

The extent of default visual perspective taking in complex layouts.

Emerging research suggests that visual perspective taking might be based in part on a default, early developing cognitive process. This hypothesis receives support from experiments demonstrating that adults experience interference from task-irrelevant perspectives of depicted agents even when participants are making judgments about their own perspective. However, a number of recent articles conclude that this self-judgment interference effect may be because of simple directional cues alone, and might, therefore, not reflect processes specific to visual perspective taking.

Default processing of event sequences.

In a wide range of circumstances, it is important to perceive and represent the sequence of events. For example, sequence perception is necessary to learn statistical contingencies between events, and to generate predictions about events when segmenting actions. However, viewer's awareness of event sequence is rarely tested, and at least some means of encoding event sequence are likely to be resource-intensive.

The role of relational triggers in event perception.

Research exploring visual attention has demonstrated that people are aware of only a small proportion of visual properties, and that people only track these properties over a subset of moments in time. This makes it critical to understand how our perceptual system leverages its limited capacity, such that properties are tracked across views only when they can support an understanding of meaningful events. In this paper, we propose that relational triggers induce between-view property comparisons when spatial relationships between objects appear inconsistent across views-moments that are particularly likely to mark the beginning of meaningful events.

Concepts about agency constrain beliefs about visual experience.

Recent research exploring phenomena such as change blindness, inattentional blindness, attentional blink and repetition blindness has revealed a number of counterintuitive ways in which apparently salient visual stimuli often go unnoticed. In fact, large majorities of subjects sometimes predict that they would detect visual changes that actually are rarely noticed, suggesting that people have strong beliefs about visual experience that are demonstrably incorrect. However, for other kinds of visual metacognition, such as picture memory, people underpredict performance.

Visual search for rare targets: distracter tuning as a mechanism for learning from repeated target-absent searches.

In the typical visual search experiment, participants search for targets that are present on half of the trials and absent on the other half. However, many real-world tasks involve targets that are present only occasionally. Given this, it is important to know how people deal with the problem of finding targets they have little experience with.

Remote control and children's understanding of robots.

Children use goal-directed motion to classify agents as living things from early in infancy. In the current study, we asked whether preschoolers are flexible in their application of this criterion by introducing them to robots that engaged in goal-directed motion. In one case the robot appeared to move fully autonomously, and in the other case it was controlled by a remote.

How do young children deal with hybrids of living and non-living things: the case of humanoid robots.

In this experiment, we tested children's intuitions about entities that bridge the contrast between living and non-living things. Three- and four-year-olds were asked to attribute a range of properties associated with living things and machines to novel category-defying complex artifacts (humanoid robots), a familiar living thing (a girl), and a familiar complex artifact (a camera). Results demonstrated that 4-year-olds tended to treat the category-defying entities like members of the inanimate group, while 3-year-olds showed more variability in their responding.

Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals.

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in two racial groups provide a rare window into social categorization and perception. In 5 experiments, we tested the extent to which a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial individuals are assigned the status of their socially subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian-White and Black-White targets. In Experiment 1, in spite of posing explicit questions concerning Asian-White and Black-White targets, hypodescent was observed in both cases and more strongly in Black-White social categorization.

The visual metacognition questionnaire: a measure of intuitions about vision.

Recent research has revealed a series of striking limits to visual perception. One important aspect of these demonstrations is the degree to which they conflict with intuition; people often believe that they will be able to see things that experiments demonstrate they cannot see. This metacognitive error has been explored with reference to a few specific visual limits, but no study has yet explored people's intuitions about vision more generally.

Audience-contingent variation in action demonstrations for humans and computers.

People may exhibit two kinds of modifications when demonstrating action for others: modifications to facilitate bottom-up, or sensory-based processing; and modifications to facilitate top-down, or knowledge-based processing. The current study examined actors' production of such modifications in action demonstrations for audiences that differed in their capacity for intentional reasoning. Actors' demonstrations of complex actions for a non-anthropomorphic computer system and for people (adult and toddler) were compared.

Implicit learning for probable changes in a visual change detection task.

Previous research demonstrates that implicitly learned probability information can guide visual attention. We examined whether the probability of an object changing can be implicitly learned and then used to improve change detection performance. In a series of six experiments, participants completed 120-130 training change detection trials.