Tracking Eye Movements during Spontaneous and Directed Refreshing

There is a growing interest in specifying the mechanisms underlying refreshing, i.e., the use of attention to keep working memory (WM) contents accessible. Here, we examined whether participants’ visual fixations during the retention interval of a WM task indicate the current focus of internal attention, thereby serving as an online measure of refreshing. Eye movements were recorded while participants studied and maintained an array of colored dots followed by probed recall of one (Experiments 1A and 1B) or all (Experiment 2) of the memoranda via a continuous color wheel. Experiments 1A and 2 entailed an unfilled retention interval in which refreshing is assumed to occur spontaneously, and Experiment 1B entailed a retention interval embedded with cues prompting the sequential refreshment of a subset of the memoranda. During the retention interval, fixations revisited the locations occupied by the memoranda, consistent with a looking-at-nothing phenomenon in WM, but the pattern was only evident when placeholders were onscreen in Experiment 2, indicating that these fixations may largely reflect random gaze. Furthermore, spontaneous fixations did not predict recall precision (Experiments 1A and 2), even when ensuring that they did not reflect random gaze (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1B, refreshing cues increased fixations to the eventually tested target and predicted better recall precision, which interacted with an overall benefit of target fixations. These results suggest that fixations during instructed, but not spontaneous, refreshing conditions account for additional variance in recall precision. Eye movements, however, do not seem suitable as an online measure of refreshing.

Atención visual a las señales de consumo de tabaco: un estudio preliminar empleando el seguimiento ocular

Introduction: attention is a basic process related to addictive behavior. In smokers, the stimuli associated with consumption are relevant because they are present at the beginning and in the consolidation of the smoking habit. Therefore, to contribute to the understanding of addictive behaviors with objective measures, a study through eye-tracking techniques is presented. This would support the clinical process of people seeking to quit smoking. Objective: to study the attentional bias with images related to tobacco consumption in smoking and non-smoking participants, using an eye-tracking technique. Method: eight university students participated, who were assigned to two groups based on their Fagerström Test score. The experimental task consisted of the random presentation of 15 images related to tobacco consumption and 15 neutral images. During the experiment, visual fixations, latency and time to each image were recorded using an eye tracker. Results: a statistical analysis showed significant differences between moderate smokers and non-smokers when images related to tobacco use were presented in the three measure. Likewise, a qualitative analysis of the results shows differences between the participants when they were presented with neutral images and images related to tobacco. Discussion and conclusions: it is suggested that in the smoking participants there is an attentional bias towards the images related to tobacco consumption.

EXPRESS: Understanding Lateral and Vertical Biases in Consumer Attention: An In-Store Ambulatory Eye-Tracking Study

Given the conventional wisdom that “unseen is unsold,” retail practitioners are keenly interested in understanding consumers’ attention to products in the store. Using in-store ambulatory eye-tracking, we investigate the extent to which lateral and vertical biases drive consumers’ attention in a grocery store environment. Our dataset offers a complete picture of not only where the shopper is located, but also the shopper’s field of view and visual fixations during the trip. Using our novel dataset, we address two research questions: First, do shoppers have a higher propensity to pay attention to products on their left or right side as they traverse an aisle (i.e., is the right side the “right side”)? Second, do shoppers tend to pay more attention to products at their eye level (i.e., is eye-level “buy-level”)? We utilize the exogenous variations in the direction by which shoppers traverse an aisle (northward vs southward), obtainable from their shopping paths, to identify lateral bias. The exogenous variation of shoppers’ eye-level positions, due to their differences in height, is used to identify vertical bias. We find that shoppers pay more attention to products on their right side when traversing an aisle, and this bias holds for both right- and left-handed shoppers. Contrary to many practitioners’ belief, we find that eye-level is not “buy-level”; rather, the product level that has the highest propensity to capture shoppers’ attention is about 14.7 inches below eye-level (which is around chest level). Further, this vertical bias becomes more prominent during the latter part of a shopping trip.

Visual fixations rather than saccades dominate the developmental eye movement test

When children have visual and/or oculomotor deficits, early diagnosis is critical for rehabilitation. The developmental eye movement (DEM) test is a visual-verbal number naming test that aims to measure oculomotor dysfunction in children by comparing scores on a horizontal and vertical subtest. However, empirical comparison of oculomotor behavior during the two subtests is missing. Here, we measured eye movements of healthy children while they performed a digital version of the DEM. In addition, we measured visual processing speed using the Speed Acuity test. We found that parameters of saccade behavior, such as the number, amplitude, and direction of saccades, correlated with performance on the horizontal, but not the vertical subtest. However, the time spent on making saccades was very short compared to the time spent on number fixations and the total time needed for either subtest. Fixation durations correlated positively with performance on both subtests and co-varied tightly with visual processing speed. Accordingly, horizontal and vertical DEM scores showed a strong positive correlation with visual processing speed. We therefore conclude that the DEM is not suitable to measure saccade behavior, but can be a useful indicator of visual-verbal naming skills, visual processing speed, and other cognitive factors of clinical relevance.

Restricted visual scanpaths during emotion recognition in childhood social anxiety disorder

Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) has its typical onset in childhood and adolescence. Maladaptive processing of social information may contribute to the etiology and maintenance. During face perception, individuals extract information with a succession of visual fixations known as a scanpath. Atypically long scanpaths have been reported in adults with SAD, but no data exists from pediatric samples. SAD has also been linked to atypical arousal. Both metrics were examined in one of the largest eye-tracking studies of pediatric SAD to dateMethods: Children and adolescents with SAD (n = 62) and healthy controls (n = 39) completed an emotion recognition task. The visual scanpath and pupil dilation (an indirect index of arousal) were examined. The analysis plan was preregistered.Results: Youth with SAD showed restricted scanpaths, a finding supported by both frequentist and Bayesian statistics. Higher pupil dilation was also observed in the SAD group, but despite a statistically significant group difference, this result was not supported by the Bayesian analysis.Conclusions: Findings are contrary to findings from adult studies, but similar to what has been reported in neurodevelopmental conditions associated with social interaction impairments. Restricted scanpaths may disrupt holistic representation of faces known to favor adaptive social understanding.