Damien Litchfield

Using another's gaze as an explicit aid to insight problem solving

Research has shown that implicitly guiding attention via visual cues or unrelated tasks can increase the likelihood of solving insight problems. We examined whether following another person making specific skin-crossing saccades could induce similar attentional shifts and increase solution rates for Dunckers ((1945)) radiation problem. We presented 150 participants with one of three 30-s eye movement patterns from another problem solver: (a) focusing solely on the central tumour; (b) naturally making skin-crossing saccades between the outside area and the tumour from multiple angles; or (c) making deliberate skin-crossing saccades between the outside area and the tumour from multiple angles. Following another person making skin-crossing saccades increased the likelihood of solving the radiation problem. Our results demonstrate that another persons eye movements can promote attentional shifts that trigger insight problem solving.

Immobilisation of the knee and ankle and its impact on drivers’ braking times: A DRIVING SIMULATOR STUDY

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of right leg restriction at the knee, ankle or both, on a drivers braking times. Previous studies have not investigated the effects of knee restriction on braking performance. A total of 23 healthy drivers performed a series of emergency braking tests in a driving simulator in either an above-knee plaster cast, a below-knee cast, or in a knee brace with an increasing range of restriction. The study showed that total braking reaction time was significantly longer when wearing an above-knee plaster cast, a below-knee plaster cast or a knee brace fixed at 0°, compared with braking normally (p < 0.001). Increases in the time taken to move the foot from the accelerator to the brake accounted for some of the increase in the total braking reaction time. Unexpectedly, thinking time also increased with the level of restriction (p < 0.001). The increase in braking time with an above-knee plaster cast in this study would increase the stopping distance at 30 miles per hour by almost 3 m. These results suggest that all patients wearing any lower-limb plaster cast or knee brace are significantly impaired in their ability to perform an emergency stop. We suggest changes to the legislation to prevent patients from driving with lower-limb plaster casts or knee braces.

Learning from others : effects of viewing another person's eye movements while searching for chest nodules

We report a study that investigated whether experienced and inexperienced radiographers benefit from knowing where another person looked during pulmonary nodule detection. Twenty-four undergraduate radiographers (1 year of experience) and 24 postgraduate radiographers (5+ years of experience) searched 42 chest x-rays for nodules and rated how confident they were in their decisions. Eye movements were also recorded. Performance was compared across three within-participant conditions: (1) free search - where radiographers could identify nodules as normal; (2) image preview - where radiographers were first shown each chest x-ray for 20 seconds before they could then proceed to mark the location of any nodules; and (3) eye movement preview - which was identical to image preview except that the 20 second viewing period displayed an overlay of the real-time eye movements of another radiographers scanpath for that image. For this preview condition half of each group were shown where a novice radiographer looked, and the other half were shown where an experienced radiologist looked. This was not made known to the participants until after the experiment. Performance was assessed using JAFROC analysis. Both groups of radiographers performed better in the eye movement preview condition compared with the image preview or free search conditions, with inexperienced radiographers improving the most. We discuss our findings in terms of the task-specific information interpreted from eye movement previews, task difficulty across images, and whether it matters if radiographers are previewing the eye movements of an expert or a novice.

When distraction helps: Evidence that concurrent articulation and irrelevant speech can facilitate insight problem solving

We report an experiment investigating the “special-process” theory of insight problem solving, which claims that insight arises from non-conscious, non-reportable processes that enable problem re-structuring. We predicted that reducing opportunities for speech-based processing during insight problem solving should permit special processes to function more effectively and gain conscious awareness, thereby facilitating insight. We distracted speech-based processing by using either articulatory suppression or irrelevant speech, with findings for these conditions supporting the predicted insight facilitation effect relative to silent working or thinking aloud. The latter condition was included to investigate the currently contested effect of “verbal overshadowing” on insight, whereby thinking aloud is claimed to hinder the operation of special, non-reportable processes. Whilst verbal overshadowing was not evident in final solution rates, there was nevertheless support for verbal overshadowing up to and beyond the mid-point of the available problem solving time. Overall our data support a special-process theory of insight, whilst also pointing to the role of moderator variables (e.g., available time for solution) in determining the presence or absence of effects predicted by the special-process account.

Visual information search in simulated junction negotiation: gaze transitions of young novice, young experienced and older experienced drivers.

INTRODUCTION Older drivers and young novice drivers have problems negotiating road junctions. Explanations for problems largely focus on limitations in visual information processing and observation errors associated with age and experience. METHOD Gaze transitions provide information on the positional relationship of fixations, providing a useful tool for highlighting gaps in drivers visual information acquisition strategies. The gaze transitions of three driver groups (young novice, young experienced, and older experienced) were compared during gap selection in right turn junction negotiation manoeuvres. RESULTS When scanning the junction, young experienced drivers distributed their gaze more evenly across all areas, whereas older and novice drivers made more sweeping transitions, bypassing adjacent areas. The use of a preview strategy in the decision phase was less evident in the older experienced group compared to the younger groups. IMPACT The application of results to driver training interventions and future research are discussed.

Interactivity and Embodied Cues in Problem Solving, Learning and Insight: Further Contributions to a “Theory of Hints”

This chapter addresses the situated, embodied and interactive characteristics of problem solving by focusing on the cues that arise within a solver’s external environment. In examining the influence of external cues on problem solving we have been heavily influenced by Kirsh’s (The Cambridge handbook of situated cognition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009) “theory of hints”. We extend this theory to include hints that derive from the communicative properties of other people’s eye movements, focusing on the role of eye gaze in directing attention and conveying information that can be beneficial for problem solving. A particularly interesting aspect of eye gaze is its capacity to facilitate the perceptual priming of motor simulations in an observer. This gives rise to the potential for an expert problem solver’s eye movements to cue imitative perceptual and attentional processing in less expert observers that can promote effective problem solving. We review studies that support the hypothesised role of gaze cues in scaffolding problem solving, focusing on examples from insight tasks and diagnostic radiography. Findings reveal that eye gaze can support a variety of decisions and judgements in problem solving contexts. In sum, knowing where another person looks provides hints that can act both implicitly and explicitly to cue attention and to shape thoughts and decisions.

Worth a quick look? Initial scene previews can guide eye movements as a function of domain-specific expertise but can also have unforeseen costs.

Rapid scene recognition is a global visual process we can all exploit to guide search. This ability is thought to underpin expertise in medical image perception yet there is no direct evidence that isolates the expertise-specific contribution of processing scene previews on subsequent eye movement performance. We used the flash-preview moving window paradigm (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007) to investigate this issue. Expert radiologists and novice observers underwent 2 experiments whereby participants viewed a 250-ms scene preview or a mask before searching for a target. Observers looked for everyday objects from real-world scenes (Experiment 1), and searched for lung nodules from medical images (Experiment 2). Both expertise groups exploited the brief preview of the upcoming scene to more efficiently guide windowed search in Experiment 1, but there was only a weak effect of domain-specific expertise in Experiment 2, with experts showing small improvements in search metrics with scene previews. Expert diagnostic performance was better than novices in all conditions but was not contingent on seeing the scene preview, and scene preview actually impaired novice diagnostic performance. Experiment 3 required novice and experienced observers to search for a variety of abnormalities from different medical images. Rather than maximizing the expertise-specific advantage of processing scene previews, both novices and experienced radiographers were worse at detecting abnormalities with scene previews. We discuss how restricting access to the initial glimpse can be compensated for by subsequent search and discovery processing, but there can still be costs in integrating a fleeting glimpse of a medical scene. (PsycINFO Database Record

Saccadic eye movement abnormalities in children with epilepsy

Childhood onset epilepsy is associated with disrupted developmental integration of sensorimotor and cognitive functions that contribute to persistent neurobehavioural comorbidities. The role of epilepsy and its treatment on the development of functional integration of motor and cognitive domains is unclear. Oculomotor tasks can probe neurophysiological and neurocognitive mechanisms vulnerable to developmental disruptions by epilepsy-related factors. The study involved 26 patients and 48 typically developing children aged 8–18 years old who performed a prosaccade and an antisaccade task. Analyses compared medicated chronic epilepsy patients and unmedicated controlled epilepsy patients to healthy control children on saccade latency, accuracy and dynamics, errors and correction rate, and express saccades. Patients with medicated chronic epilepsy had impaired and more variable processing speed, reduced accuracy, increased peak velocity and a greater number of inhibitory errors, younger unmedicated patients also showed deficits in error monitoring. Deficits were related to reported behavioural problems in patients. Epilepsy factors were significant predictors of oculomotor functions. An earlier age at onset predicted reduced latency of prosaccades and increased express saccades, and the typical relationship between express saccades and inhibitory errors was absent in chronic patients, indicating a persistent reduction in tonic cortical inhibition and aberrant cortical connectivity. In contrast, onset in later childhood predicted altered antisaccade dynamics indicating disrupted neurotransmission in frontoparietal and oculomotor networks with greater demand on inhibitory control. The observed saccadic abnormalities are consistent with a dysmaturation of subcortical-cortical functional connectivity and aberrant neurotransmission. Eye movements could be used to monitor the impact of epilepsy on neurocognitive development and help assess the risk for poor neurobehavioural outcomes.

Learning from where ‘eye’ remotely look or point: impact on number line estimation error in adults.

In this article, we present an investigation into the use of visual cues during number line estimation and their influence on cognitive processes for reducing number line estimation error. Participants completed a 0-1000 number line estimation task before and after a brief intervention in which they observed static-visual or dynamic-visual cues (control, anchor, gaze cursor, mouse cursor) and also made estimation marks to test effective number-target estimation. Results indicated that a significant pre-test to post-test reduction in estimation error was present for dynamic-visual cues of modelled eye-gaze and mouse cursor. However, there was no significant performance difference between pre- and post-test for the control or static anchor conditions. Findings are discussed in relation to the extent to which anchor points alone are meaningful in promoting successful segmentation of the number line and whether dynamic cues promote the utility of these locations in reducing error through attentional guidance.

Staying over-optimistic about the future: Uncovering attentional biases to climate change messages

Abstract There is considerable concern that the public are not getting the message about climate change. One possible explanation is “optimism bias,” where individuals overestimate the likelihood of positive events happening to them and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. Evidence from behavioral neuroscience suggest that this bias is underpinned by selective information processing, specifically through a reduced level of neural coding of undesirable information, and an unconscious tendency for optimists to avoid fixating negative information. Here we test how this bias in attention could relate to the processing of climate change messages. Using eye tracking, we found that level of dispositional optimism affected visual fixations on climate change messages. Optimists spent less time (overall dwell time) attending to any arguments about climate changes (either “for” or “against”) with substantially shorter individual fixations on aspects of arguments for climate change, i.e., those that reflect the scientific consensus but are bad news. We also found that when asked to summarize what they had read, non-optimists were more likely to frame their recall in terms of the arguments “for” climate change; optimists were significantly more likely to frame it in terms of a debate between two opposing positions. Those highest in dispositional optimism seemed to have the strongest and most pronounced level of optimism bias when it came to estimating the probability of being personally affected by climate change. We discuss the importance of overcoming this cognitive bias to develop more effective strategies for communicating about climate change.