The Specificity and Reliability of Conflict Adaptation: A Mouse-Tracking Study

Researchers have recently begun to question the specificity and reliability of conflict adaptation effects, also known as sequential congruency effects (SCEs), a highly cited effect in cognitive psychology. Some have even used the lack of reliability across tasks (e.g., Flanker, and Stroop) to argue against models of cognitive control that have dominated the field for decades. The present study tested the possibility that domain-general processes across tasks might appear on more sensitive mouse-tracking metrics rather than overall reaction times. The relationship between SCE effects on the Stroop and Flanker tasks were examined for the first time using a mouse-tracking paradigm. Three main findings emerged: (1) Robust SCEs were observed for both the Stroop and Flanker tasks at the group level, (2) Within-task split-half reliabilities for the SCE across dependent variables were weak at best and non-existent in many cases, and (3) SCEs for the Flanker and Stroop tasks did not correlate with each other for overall reaction times, but did show significant correlations between tasks on more dynamic measures that captured processes before response execution. These findings contribute to the literature by highlighting how mouse-tracking may be a fruitful avenue by which future studies can examine the specificity and reliability of conflict adaptation and tease apart different theoretical models producing the effects.

Joint Simon effect in movement trajectories

In joint action literature it is often assumed that acting together is driven by pervasive and automatic process of co-representation, that is, representing the co-actor’s part of the task in addition to one’s own. Much of this research employs joint stimulus-response compatibility tasks varying the stimuli employed or the physical and social relations between participants. In this study we test the robustness of co-representation effects by focusing instead on variation in response modality. Specifically, we implement a mouse-tracking version of a Joint Simon Task in which participants respond by producing continuous movements with a computer mouse rather than pushing discrete buttons. We have three key findings. First, in a replication of an earlier study we show that in a classical individual Simon Task movement trajectories show greater curvature on incongruent trials, paralleling longer response times. Second, this effect largely disappears in a Go-NoGo Simon Task, in which participants respond to only one of the cues and refrain from responding to the other. Third, contrary to previous studies that use button pressing responses, we observe no overall effect in the joint variants of the task. However, we also detect a notable diversity in movement strategies adopted by the participants, with some participants showing the effect on the individual level. Our study casts doubt on the pervasiveness of co-representation, highlights the usefulness of mouse-tracking methodology and emphasizes the need for looking at individual variation in task performance.

Análise da Experiência do Usuário (UX) de Narrativa Transmídia através de Mouse-Tracking

Neste artigo apresentamos um método de avaliação da experiência do usuário a partir de métricas de rastreamento de mouse (mouse-tracking). Para identificar as interações no site transmídia De barrio somos utilizamos um sistema quantitativo de rastreamento de interações intitulado Artificial Intelligence and Mouse Tracking-Based user Experience Evaluation Tool (AIMT-UXT). Recorremos à entrevista estruturada para obter dados para confrontar resultados analíticos das interações. Este mapeamento foi feito com alunos de Jornalismo da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, que navegaram no site e participaram da pesquisa. Como resultado, observamos maior interesse nos audiovisuais.

Taking the perspective of narrative characters

An ongoing debate in the interpretation of referring expressions concerns the degree to which listeners make use of perspective information during referential processing. We aim to contribute to this debate by considering perspective shifting in narrative discourse. In a web-based mouse-tracking experiment in Dutch, we investigated whether listeners automatically shift to a narrative character’s perspective when resolving ambiguous referring expressions, and whether different linguistic perspective-shifting devices affect how and when listeners switch to another perspective. We compared perspective-neutral, direct, and free indirect discourse, manipulating which objects are visible to the character. Our results do not show a clear effect of the perspective shifting devices on participants’ eventual choice of referent, but our online mouse-tracking data reveal processing differences that suggest that listeners are indeed sensitive to the conventional markers of perspective shift associated with direct and (to a lesser degree) free indirect discourse.

MT-aIAT: Integrating mouse tracking into memory-detection aIAT

This study assesses the validity of a newly integrated memory detection method, MT-aIAT, which is a combination of the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) and the mouse-tracking method. Participants were assigned to steal a credit card and then performed the aIAT while mouse tracker was recording their motor trajectories. Replicating previous work, we found a RT congruency effect. Critically, the mouse trajectories indicate a congruency effect and a block order effect, suggesting the validity of mouse-tracking technique in unraveling real-time measurement of the IAT congruency effect. Lastly, to test the computational modeling in MT-aIAT, we posited a connectionist model combined with the drift-discussion model to simulate participants’ behavioral performance. Our model captures the ubiquitous implicit bias towards the autobiographical event. Implications of the MT-aIAT in identifying autobiographical memories, the combination of MT-aIAT with computational modeling approach were discussed.