Kamilla R. Johannsdottir

Monovision: a review of the scientific literature.

We reviewed the scientific literature on monovision to compare the visual performance of monovision patients with that of others wearing more traditional prescriptions. We found that visual performance of monovision patients was comparable to that of control patients wearing a balanced binocular correction, provided that reading adds were not greater than about +2.5 D, that illumination was photopic, and that stimuli were presented at supra-threshold levels. Under these conditions, monovision patients were satisfied with their perceptual experience and performed within 2 to 6% of balanced binocular control patients on a range of occupational tasks. It is noteworthy that monovision patients had relatively more difficulty with acuity-based tasks than with tasks demanding good depth perception. With reading adds over +2.5 D, at low levels of illumination, or with near-threshold level stimuli, visual performance of monovision patients was reduced compared with controls. Subjectively, under low levels of illumination, monovision patients experienced problems with glare and halos around point sources of light.

Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2012

The conference on “ Biologically Inspired Cognitive – Architectures (BICA) 2012” was held in Palermo, Italy from October 31 to November 2. It has been the third annual meeting of the BICA Society and the fifth annual BICA meeting. (Chella et al. 2012) The series of BICA conferences started in 2008 under the umbrella of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). In 2010, the BICA Society was incorporated as a nonprofit organization – a scientific society with headquarters in the United States, with the mission of promoting and facilitating the transdisciplinary study of BICA (Samsonovich et al. 2010, Samsonovich 2012).a aSee also the BICA website http://bicasociety.org/

The Role of Working Memory in Supporting Drivers’ Situation Awareness for Surrounding Traffic

Objective: To link working memory to driver situational awareness (SA) for surrounding traffic. Background: Operating a motor vehicle is a complex activity that requires drivers to maintain a high level of SA. Working memory has been conceptually linked to SA; however, the roles of working memory subsystems in supporting driver SA is unclear. Method: Participants drove a simulated vehicle and monitored surrounding traffic while concurrently performing either visuospatial- or phonological-load tasks. Drivers’ SA was indexed as the ability to recall the positions of the surrounding traffic relative to their own vehicle at the end of each trial. Results: In Experiment 1, a visuospatial task interfered with drivers’ ability to recall the positions of traffic located in front of their vehicle. In contrast, a phonological task interfered with drivers’ ability to recall the positions of traffic located behind their vehicle. Experiment 2 confirmed and extended the findings of Experiment 1 with the use of different visuospatial- and phonological-load tasks. Conclusion: Visuospatial and phonological codes play a role in supporting driver SA for traffic located in the forward view and the rear view, respectively. Application: Drivers’ SA for surrounding vehicles is disrupted by concurrent performance on secondary tasks. The development and implementation of new in-cabin communication, navigation, and informational technologies needs to be done with the knowledge that components of drivers’ working memory capacity may be exceeded, thereby compromising driving safety.

Object-based attention and cognitive tunneling.

Simulator-based research has shown that pilots cognitively tunnel their attention on head-up displays (HUDs). Cognitive tunneling has been linked to object-based visual attention on the assumption that HUD symbology is perceptually grouped into an object that is perceived and attended separately from the external scene. The present research strengthens the link between cognitive tunneling and object-based attention by showing that (a) elements of a visual display that share a common fate are grouped into a perceptual object and that this grouping is sufficient to sustain object-based attention, (b) object-based attention and thereby cognitive tunneling is affected by strategic focusing of attention, and (c) object-based attention is primarily inhibitory in nature.

Unconscious mind: Authenticating with something you don't know? Or just an infallible liveness test?

Biometrics has become a major field of study in the area of computer security. Liveness tests complement biometric systems by introducing an extra level of authentication to prevent identity forgeries. In this abstract we present the fundamental ideas behind a new authentication paradigm that captures the individuals unique signature by measuring unconsciously motivated mistakes or actions. The robustness of our system relies on the hypothesis that each individual possesses behavioural characteristics that are brought about by some unique traits (i.e. how information is processed, categorized and accessed) that are not consciously accessible to the individual and can be measured as that individuals unique behavioural signature. We will refer to this unconsciously motivated behavioural signature as the unconsciousness signature. An implicit result includes the use of our proposed system as a liveness detection mechanism. Here we describe our hypotheses and provide a rationale that indicates their suitability for further studies as a new authentication paradigm.

The role of working memory capacity in cardiovascular monitoring of cognitive workload

Cardiovascular measures have been found to be sensitive to task onset and offset, but are less sensitive to adjacent levels of increasing cognitive workload. A potential confound in the literature is the disregard of individual differences in cardiovascular reactivity. In particular, the individuals‘ working memory capacity (WMC) is likely to play a role in cardiovascular reactivity to workload. A total of 98 university students performed four cognitive tasks that varied in their level of workload. The operation span (OSPAN) task was used to measure the participants‘ WMC. A variety of cardiovascular measures were gathered in real time during the experiment. Derived measures of blood pressure regulation were also calculated. In line with what was hypothesized, cardiovascular measures detected workload onset and offset but did not consistently distinguish between the individual task levels. Furthermore, a significant interaction between workload levels and WMC showed that the individuals‘ cardiovascular profile varied depending on their WMC scores. In addition, WMC negatively predicted subjective ratings of task difficulty as well as task performance, with subjective estimation of task difficulty and error increasing as WMC decreased. The results suggest that WMC may play a critical role in determining how individuals react to increased cognitive workload.