Eye-Tracker Study of Influence of Affective Disruptive Content on User’s Visual Attention and Emotional State

When reading interesting content or searching for information on a website, the appearance of a pop-up advertisement in the middle of the screen is perceived as irritating by a recipient. Interrupted cognitive processes are considered unwanted by the user but desired by advertising providers. Diverting visual attention away from the main content is intended to focus the user on the appeared disruptive content. Is the attempt to reach the user by any means justified? In this study, we examined the impact of pop-up emotional content on user reactions. For this purpose, a cognitive experiment was designed where a text-reading task was interrupted by two types of affective pictures: positive and negative ones. To measure the changes in user reactions, an eye-tracker (for analysis of eye movements and changes in gaze points) and an iMotion Platform (for analysis of face muscles’ movements) were used. The results confirm the impact of the type of emotional content on users’ reactions during cognitive process interruptions and indicate that the negative impact of cognitive process interruptions on the user can be reduced. The negative content evoked lower cognitive load, narrower visual attention, and lower irritation compared to positive content. These results offer insight on how to provide more efficient Internet advertising.

Konceptuelle metaforer som selektionskriterium for Dansk litteraturs kanon - med fokus på elevers literacytilegnelse på tværs af tidsrum, sprog og kultur i arbejdet med kanonlitteratur

This article argues that an increased focus on the inherent conceptual metaphors of chronotopes in canonical literature may contribute to students’ awareness of the historical and literary development in time and space. Thus, expanding their literacy-skills acquisition in comparison to the linear chronological periodization, author-portrait and text reading that typically characterize the reading of canon literature. Furthermore, the article argues that an increased focus on bi- and multilingual students’ interpretation of conceptual metaphors may contribute to the historical and literary development.

Semantic Study on Network News Texts in Mode of “Distant Reading”

The corpus adopted in this study is from the official news texts of Chinese and foreign network media collected and processed by researchers. By Voyant, a web-based text reading and analysis platform, the study finds and analyzes the semantic differences of lexical chunk Chinese culture in Chinese and foreign news stories under the semantic view of systematic-functional grammar with the digital humanistic mode “distant reading” as the semantic analysis research means. the study explores the implicit semantic deviation and its logical semantic relationship between Chinese and foreign news texts.

Mobile Detection and Alarming Systems for Hazardous Gases and Volatile Chemicals in Laboratories and Industrial Locations

The leakage of hazardous gases and chemical vapors is considered one of the dangerous accidents that can occur in laboratories, workshops, warehouses, and industrial sites that use or store these substances. The early detection and alarming of hazardous gases and volatile chemicals are significant to keep the safety conditions for the people and life forms who are work in and live around these places. In this paper, we investigate the available mobile detection and alarming systems for toxic, hazardous gases and volatile chemicals, especially in the laboratory environment. We included papers from January 2010 to August 2021 which may have the newest used sensors technologies and system components. We identified (236) papers from Clarivate Web of Science (WoS), IEEE, ACM Library, Scopus, and PubMed. Paper selection has been done based on a fast screening of the title and abstract, then a full-text reading was applied to filter the selected papers that resulted in (42) eligible papers. The main goal of this work is to discuss the available mobile hazardous gas detection and alarming systems based on several technical details such as the used gas detection technology (simple element, integrated, smart, etc.), sensor manufacturing technology (catalytic bead, MEMS, MOX, etc.) the sensor specifications (warm-up time, lifetime, response time, precision, etc.), processor type (microprocessor, microcontroller, PLC, etc.), and type of the used communication technology (Bluetooth/BLE, Wi-Fi/RF, ZigBee/XBee, LoRa, etc.). In this review, attention will be focused on the improvement of the detection and alarming system of hazardous gases with the latest invention in sensors, processors, communication, and battery technologies.

CONSTRUCTING A SELF BETWEEN IMAGE AND TEXT: READING BECHDEL’S FUN HOME

Graphic memoirs offer a visual representation of the relationship between a moment and the construction of memory. McCloud describes the work of the comic author and the reader as a dance between “the seen and the unseen”. This is what makes the medium of graphic memoirs unique, as it “gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well” (1993, p. 92). My aim in this paper is to ascertain the impact using graphic conventions has on the effective and affective construction of meaning and identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and howr The Gutter becomes even more significant in graphic memoirs, because the use of panels can fracture the flow of the narrative into the sequenced segments which alternate with the blank spaces of the gutters. These blank spaces represent an effort to redefine the “connections between memory and history, private experience and public life” via a written account and the “act of witness” represented by a combination of the visual and the verbal (Cvetkovich, 2008, 111-20). Using this mix of image and text, Bechdel creates an almost palimpsestic effect as a majority of panels show items layered over other images, indicating a blending between the narrative of Bechdel’s real life experience and the representation of that life experience in the text. For the reader, this can imply a way to address the gaps in knowledge not only for them but also for Bechdel herself.

Understanding the usability issues in contact management of illiterate and semi-literate users

The effective utilization of a communication channel like calling a person involves two steps. The first step is storing the contact information of another user, and the second step is finding contact information to initiate a voice or text communication. However, the current smartphone interfaces for contact management are mainly textual; which leaves many emergent users at a severe disadvantage in using this most basic functionality to the fullest. Previous studies indicated that less-educated users adopt various coping strategies to store and identify contacts. However, all of these studies investigated the contact management issues of these users from a qualitative angle. Although qualitative or subjective investigations are very useful, they generally need to be augmented by a quantitative investigation for a comprehensive problem understanding. This work presents an exploratory study to identify the usability issues and coping strategies in contact management by emergent users; by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches. We identified coping strategies of the Pakistani population and the effectiveness of these strategies through a semi-structured qualitative study of 15 participants and a usability study of 9 participants, respectively. We then obtained logged data of 30 emergent and 30 traditional users, including contact-books and dual-channel (call and text messages) logs to infer a more detailed understanding; and to analyse the differences in the composition of contact-books of both user groups. The analysis of the log data confirmed problems that affect the emergent users’ communication behaviour due to the various difficulties they face in storing and searching contacts. Our findings revealed serious usability issues in current communication interfaces over smartphones. The emergent users were found to have smaller contact-books and preferred voice communication due to reading/writing difficulties. They also reported taking help from others for contact saving and text reading. The alternative contact management strategies adopted by our participants include: memorizing whole number or last few digits to recall important contacts; adding special character sequence with contact numbers for better recall; writing a contact from scratch rather than searching it in the phone-book; voice search; and use of recent call logs to redial a contact. The identified coping strategies of emergent users could aid the developers and designers to come up with solutions according to emergent users’ mental models and needs.

Pupil changes in persons aged 8 to 79 during text reading – an eye-tracking study

Summary The Eye Tribe eye-tracker was used to capture pupil sizes and fixation times of 40 people aged 8 to 79 years during text reading. The dependence of the number of readable lines on the participants’ age was determined. A function describing the dependence of the eye surface area on age was also derived. Visual perception of the maximum number of consecutive lines with decreasing text font size is best for people aged 30–40. For the studied age group, the pupil area decreased with age by approximately 300%. An approximately two-fold increase in average fixation times was recorded.