The Development of Infants’ Expectations for Event Timing

The capacity to process and incorporate temporal information into behavioural decisions is an integral component for functioning in our environment. Whereas previous research has extended adults’ temporal processing capacity down the developmental timeline to infants, little research has examined infants’ capacity to use that temporal information in guiding their future behaviours and whether this capacity can detect event-timing differences on the order of milliseconds. The present study examined 3- and 6-month-old infants’ ability to process temporal durations of 700 and 1200 milliseconds by means of the Visual Expectation Cueing Paradigm in which the duration of a central stimulus predicted either a target appearing on the left or on the right of a screen. If 3- and 6-month-old infants could discriminate the milliseconds difference between the centrally-presented temporal cues, then they would correctly make anticipatory eye movements to the proper target location at a rate above chance. Results indicated that 6- but not 3-month-olds successfully discriminated and incorporated events’ temporal information into their visual expectations. Brain maturation and the perceptual capacity to discriminate the relative timing values of temporal events may account for these findings. This developmental limitation in processing and discriminating events on the scale of milliseconds, consequently, may be a limiting factor for attentional and cognitive development that has not previously been explored.

Music sight-reading expertise, visually disrupted score and eye movements

Previous studies have shown that performance at a defined level of music sight reading for pianists (6th Grade) is predictive of eye movement patterns (Waters, 1998) and that such patterns resemble those of text reading experts (Furneaux & Land, 1999; Sloboda, 1974; Truitt, 1997; Wolf, 1976). However, little is known about how expertise might affect eye movement patterns when the score has been visually disrupted using notational features that are unexpected or outside conventional presentation.The current project examined the effect of altering features of the music score on eye movement patterns of expert and non-expert music sight readers. Participants sight read specifically composed musical excerpts, which were then re-presented with the bar-lines removed, altered inter-note spacing and unpredictable beaming directions. Fixation and saccade characteristics were measured and compared between the two performances. It was expected that expert music sight readers would be most affected when the score was disrupted as they would be less capable of grouping notes into familiar, single units for efficient visual processing. Expert sight readers performed significantly faster than non-experts in both conditions: p<0.0001. Saccadic latency increased significantly for experts in the disrupted condition: p=0.0259, while non-experts increased slightly, not reaching significance. This suggests that the disruption of visual expectation was sufficient to cause a lengthening of saccade programming in the experts - an indication of interference with the chunking process. The resultant EM patterns for the non-experts demonstrated heightened non-expert behaviours: increased fixations of shorter duration.

Effects of Expectation Uncertainty and Surprise on Quality Perception Factors of Expectation Effect

In the user’s perception of a product’s qualities, the state of their sensory modality may shift from one state to another. For example, users see and then touch a product to perceive its texture. Between such state transitions, users have expectations regarding their subsequent states based on their experience of a current state event. Expectation effect is a psychological effect in which prior expectation changes posterior perception itself. The effect is a key factor to design user’s emotions induced by expectation disconfirmation as well as designing a perceived quality based on prior expectations. Although experimental findings on the expectation effect exist in a variety of research disciplines, general and theoretical models of the effect have been largely neglected. The present authors previously found out the visual expectation effect on tactile perceptions of surface texture. The causes of the expectation effect, however, remain largely unexplored. To intentionally design the expectation effect, general and theoretical models that estimates conditions of the effect is needed. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model of the expectation effect using information theory and an affective expectation model (AEM). We hypothesize that Shannon’s entropy of the prior subjective probability distributions of posterior experience determines the occurrence of the expectation effect and that the amount of information gained after experiencing a posterior event is positively correlated with the intensity of the expectation effect. We further hypothesize that a conscious level of expectation discrepancy distinguishes between two types of expectation effect, namely, assimilation and contrast. To verify these hypotheses, we conducted an experiment in which participants responded to the tactile qualities of surface texture. In the experiment, we extracted the visual expectation effect on tactile roughness during a sensory modality transition from vision to touch and analyzed the causes of the effect based on our hypotheses. The experimental results indicated the appropriateness of the proposed model of the expectation effect.