Pilar Quirós

Pupillary dilation as an index of task demands.

To analyze how pupillary responses reflect mental effort and allocation of processing resources under several load conditions, the pupil diameter of 18 participants was recorded during an auditory digit-span recall task under three load conditions: Low (5 digits), Moderate (8 digits), and Overload (11 digits). In previous research, under all load conditions a significant linear enlargement in pupil diameter was observed as each digit was presented. Significant dilations from the end of the presentation phase to the beginning of the recall phase were also observed but only under low and moderate loads. Contrary to previous research, under the Overload condition, no reduction in pupil diameter was observed when resource limits were exceeded; however, a plateau was observed when the ninth digit was presented until the beginning of the recall phase. Overall, pupillometric data seem to indicate that participants may keep processing actively even though resources are exceeded.

Filtering of Spontaneous and Low Intensity Emotions in Educational Contexts

Affect detection is a challenging problem, even more in educational contexts, where emotions are spontaneous and usually subtle. In this paper, we propose a two-stage detection approach based on an initial binary discretization followed by a specific emotion prediction stage. The binary classification method uses several distinct sources of information to detect and filter relevant time slots from an affective point of view. An accuracy close to 75% at detecting whether the learner has felt an educationally relevant emotion on 20 second time slots has been obtained. These slots can then be further analyzed by a second classifier, to determine the specific user emotion.

Challenges for inclusive affective detection in educational scenarios

There exist diverse challenges for inclusive emotions detection in educational scenarios. In order to gain some insight about the difficulties and limitations of them, we have analyzed requirements, accommodations and tasks that need to be adapted for an experiment where people with different functional profiles have taken part. Adaptations took into consideration logistics, tasks involved and user interaction techniques. The main aim was to verify to what extent the same approach, measurements and technological infrastructure already used in previous experiments were adequate for inducing emotions elicited from the execution of the experiment tasks. In the paper, we discuss the experiment arrangements needed to cope with people with different functional profiles, which include adaptations on the analysis and results. Such analysis was validated in a pilot experiment with 3 visually impaired participants.

Intersaccadic drift velocity is sensitive to short-term hypobaric hypoxia

Hypoxia, defined as decreased availability of oxygen in the bodys tissues, can lead to dyspnea, rapid pulse, syncope, visual dysfunction, mental disturbances such as delirium or euphoria, and even death. It is considered to be one of the most serious hazards during flight. Thus, early and objective detection of the physiological effects of hypoxia is critical to prevent catastrophes in civil and military aviation. The few studies that have addressed the effects of hypoxia on objective oculomotor metrics have had inconsistent results, however. Thus, the question of whether hypoxia modulates eye movement behavior remains open. Here we examined the effects of short‐term hypobaric hypoxia on the velocity of saccadic eye movements and intersaccadic drift of Spanish Air Force pilots and flight engineers, compared with a control group that did not experience hypoxia. Saccadic velocity decreased with time‐on‐duty in both groups, in correlation with subjective fatigue. Intersaccadic drift velocity increased in the hypoxia group only, suggesting that acute hypoxia diminishes eye stability, independently of fatigue. Our results suggest that intersaccadic drift velocity could serve as a biomarker of acute hypoxia. These findings may also contribute to our understanding of the relationship between hypoxia episodes and central nervous system impairments.

Differences in duration of eye fixation for conditions in a numerical stroop-effect experiment.

Durations of eye fixation were recorded for a numerical Stroop effect experiment. Participants (6 men, 19 women; M age = 22 yr.) reported the number of characters present in sequences of variable length (2 to 5 characters) while attempting to ignore the identity of the character. Three conditions were included: congruent (the number of characters and the numeral were matched, e.g., responding “two” to 22), incongruent (the number of characters and the numeral were mismatched, e.g., responding “two” to 55), and control (baseline of stimuli made up of “X”s, e.g., responding “two” to XX). Comparisons among the three conditions produced the longest response times and average durations of fixation for the incongruent condition. The shortest response times and average durations of fixation were obtained for the congruent condition.