Laure Léger

BASETY: Extension et typicalité des exemplaires pour 21 catégories d'objets.

Basety is a French semantic database of exemplars of 21 categories of objects, with a typicality index associated with each exemplar. These 21 semantic categories are animals, trees, weapons, buildings, flowers, fruits, insects, instruments of music, games, toys, vegetables, mammals, furniture, birds, tools, fish, occupation, containers, sports, vehicles, and clothes. Basety was made up with two groups of 18-to-30 years old French participants, a first group of three subgroups of 100 participants producing exemplars for 7 x 3 categories while a second group of 80 participants evaluating membership of these exemplars. Typicality was computed as the number of occurrences of the exemplar within the set of the five exemplars participants were first producing. Cronbachs coefficient of reliability indicates an internally consistent scale and number of exemplars is correlated with membership ratings: the more the participants of the first group produced exemplars, the more the participants of the second group agreed on the degree of membership of these exemplars. BASETY appears to be a consistent and valid database for French semantic research.

Effect of the task, visual and semantic context on word target detection

Although being a daily task, the search for a word among others words is a new research domain we investigated in order to find the kinds contextual factors that can facilitate semantic oriented visual search. We report two experiments assessing task context, visual context and semantic context. Some of our results are found to be those of classical non-semantic visual search, while others show the impact of the semantic context. Basic recommendations can be find out for Human-Computer conception and cognitive chronometry methodology.

When canary primes yellow: effects of semantic memory on overt attention

This study explored how overt attention is influenced by the colour that is primed when a target word is read during a lexical visual search task. Prior studies have shown that attention can be influenced by conceptual or perceptual overlap between a target word and distractor pictures: attention is attracted to pictures that have the same form (rope – snake) or colour (green – frog) as the spoken target word or is drawn to an object from the same category as the spoken target word (trumpet – piano). The hypothesis for this study was that attention should be attracted to words displayed in the colour that is primed by reading a target word (for example, yellow for canary). An experiment was conducted in which participants’ eye movements were recorded whilst they completed a lexical visual search task. The primary finding was that participants’ eye movements were mainly directed towards words displayed in the colour primed by reading the target word, even though this colour was not relevant to completing the visual search task. This result is discussed in terms of top-down guidance of overt attention in visual search for words.

Counterfactual Based Innovation: A Galois Lattice Approach of Creative Thinking

Counterfactual reasoning is a form of modal reasoning about the way things could be (have been, would be) in contrast to reasoning about the way things actually are (were). This form of reasoning is elusive and provides reasoning bias. However, in the framework of a cognitive science theory that advocate that people reason using factual categories, counterfactuals being category counterfactuals, seen as same level collateral complementary categories of the factual category, provide a basis for innovation processes that differs from analogical thinking and case-based theory. The modeling shows how to implement tools for innovative solutions using Galois lattices and contextual graphs.

Location and orientation of panel on the screen as a structural visual element to highlight text displayed

ABSTRACT Searching for information on the internet has become a daily activity. It is considered to be a complex cognitive activity that involves visual attention. Many studies have demonstrated that users’ information search are affected both by the spatial configuration of words and the elements displayed on the screen: elements that are used to structure web pages. One of these elements, the web panel, contains information. Web panel is a rectangular area with a colored background that was used to highlighting content presented in this specific rectangular area. Our general hypothesis was that the presence of a panel on a web page would affect the structure of a word display, as a result, information search accuracy. We carried out an experiment in which we manipulated the presence vs. the absence of a panel, as well as its orientation on the screen (vertical vs. horizontal). Twenty participants were asked to answer questions while their eye movements were recorded. Results showed that the presence of a panel resulted in reduced accuracy and shorter response times. Panel orientation affected scanpaths, especially when they were orientated vertically. We discuss these findings and suggest ways in which this research could be developed further in future.

Perception and meaning: some contribution to web-based user interfaces ergonomics

This paper summarizes studies on the effect of visual and semantic object properties on target detection. The results show that the search is oriented by the visual and semantic organization of the visual scene. These results show that visual discriminability, although it doest not always inhibit semantic difficulties, can be used to improve visual search in the design of web interfaces.

Web site design: a study on the discriminability of visual and semantic properties

This paper describes semantic and visual discriminability effects in target detection. Web sites are very different in their use of a diversity of semantic and visual features. We studied how these features allow the user to get what he really wants. Our experiments show not only that visual discriminability plays a major role in target detection, but also how semantic relatedness between the target and the distractors, as well as target typicality affect detection and response time. These results are discussed in terms of cognitive principles underlying search strategy.