Abstract

Background Depression is an all-too-common mood disorder that has been linked in various ways to the cognitive concept of attention. The Attention Network Test, based on the influential taxonomy of attention originally proposed by Posner, can be used to measure the efficacy of three components or networks of attention: Alerting, Orienting and Executive Control. Our focus here is to discover how depression might affect these networks. Methods Studies related to attention and depression were selected for this meta-analytic review using the online Attention Network Test (ANT) Database (Arora, Lawrence & Klein, 2020) resource. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 5 publications were analyzed with a Bayesian hierarchical model to compare participants with and without a diagnosis of depression. Results The posterior distribution of our model revealed no credible differences in the Alerting and Orienting networks but showed credible non-zero values for Executive Control. This suggests that Executive Control is less efficient in individuals suffering from depression. Limitations As literature using the ANT with depressed participants is limited, the methodological variability between studies in this meta-analysis should be considered when interpreting these results. Conclusion This meta-analysis review is the first quantitative review that aimed to address the ANT-depression literature. A consistent finding of no alerting and no orienting deficit but a deficit in the executive control suggests that some, but not all, components of attention are impaired in depression.

Abstract

1 Introduction Recent studies show that sexually-objectified women are not only treated as sex objects but also visually processed similar to objects (local processing)[1,2]. However, Sexual objectification(SO) research has predominantly studied western society's perceptions, with few empirical studies examining other cultures. In this study, we explore SO of women in an Asian-Indian cultural/social setting using a novel design and stimuli representative of the culture. We conduct an eye tracking study that uses Navon local/global and body inversion[3] paradigms to investigate the gaze behavior and underlying visual processing when looking at non-sexualized male and female images. 2 Methods The study sample consists of Ninety-four (24 women, 70 men, age=18-27, mean=21, stdev=±2.1) undergraduate and graduate students. There are 20 trial blocks. Each trial block consists of a male/female image in upright/inverted orientation, off-centre to the screen for 7 seconds followed by a plus sign for 1 second, followed by a Navon letter identification task. The priming condition and Navon task are randomised to minimise confounding effects. The Navon image is a large letter made of small letters. The participants press 'B' if they identify either one of the target letters ('H'/‘O') either as a contour or a feature (the letter itself) otherwise press ‘N’. The classification of local/global recognition is implicit as the participants press the same key ‘B’ for both local and global images. We selected black and white male images(MI) and female images(FI) wearing casual attires like jeans/pant and top/shirt. The experiment is designed using Tobii Studio. Tobiix120 eye tracker is used to capture the gaze. We mark face, chest, hip as our Areas of Interest(AoIs) and calculate the fixation duration(FD), revisit frequency(RF), first fixation duration(FFD) for the AoIs. We define sexual body(SB) parts as sum of hip and chest AoIs. For gaze analysis, 5 participants data with poor sampling rate (below 40%) are excluded. We use Tukey Fence outlier detection method to remove outliers and removed 10 participants data for first fixation duration analysis. We measure Response Time(RT) as the time taken to press the key from the onset of the Navon image presentation. For RT analysis, we consider only the data points with at least one correct response in each priming condition, reducing our data to 59 participants. The alpha level for p-value is set to 0.05 in all tests. 3 Results There is a main effect of target (priming stimulus) gender and orientation on the FD and RF. • FD: Face FD of upright > inverted and SB parts FD of upright < inverted for both MI and FI. Face FD of FI < MI and SB parts FD of FI > MI in both upright and inverted orientation. Face FD > SB parts FD for all target images. • RF: Face RF of upright > inverted for both MI and FI. SB parts RF of inverted > upright for FI. Importantly, SB parts RF of FI > MI in upright and inverted orien-tation. Face RF < SB parts RF for all target images. • FFD: There is significant effect of orientation for FI but not for MI. Face FFD of upright FI > inverted FI and SB parts FFD of inverted FI > upright FI. • RT: Global recognition is faster in female priming for both orientations. Local recognition is faster in male priming, but the significance is found only for inverted image. The participant gender effect on RT is not significant. There is no significant correlation between local/global RT and FD. 4 Discussion Objectification theory states that women have a greater propensity to be sexually objectified than men do. This is evident from our data, female sexual body parts received greater attention than male sexual body parts and vice versa for face. However the visual attention is still greatest on the face for both male and female images, in line with [4,5,6,7,8]. As for global/local perception, non-sexualized males are processed similar to objects more than females. This is in contrast to[3,1,6] but find support in a study on Chinese population [9]. We can attribute our findings to the choice of the stimuli being personalised as against sexualized. There is a strong inversion effect on gaze, both gender images are more objectified in inverted than upright position but this doesn’t affect the underlying cognitive processing implying that the difference in the visual processing between objectified and non-objectified is more quantitative than qualitative. References 3) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., & Klein, O. (2018). Objectifying objectification: When and why people are cognitively reduced to their parts akin to objects. European Review of So-cial Psychology, 29(1), 82–121. 4) Bernard, P., Rizzo, T., Hoonhorst, I., Deliens, G., Gervais, S., B, Bayard, C., Deltenre, P., Colin, C., & Klein, O. (2018). The Neural Correlates of Cognitive Objectification. So-cial Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 550–559. 2) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., Allen, J., Campomizzi, S., & Klein, O. (2012). Integrating Sexual Objectification with Object Versus Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis. Psychological Science, 23(5), 469–471. 1) Bareket, O., Shnabel, N., Abeles, D., Gervais, S., & Yuval-Greenberg, S. (2019). Evi-dence for an Association between Men’s Spontaneous Objectifying Gazing Behavior and their Endorsement of Objectifying Attitudes toward Women. Sex Roles, 81(3–4), 245–256. 5) Cogoni, C., Carnaghi, A., Mitrovic, A., Leder, H., Fantoni, C., & Silani, G. (2018). Understanding the mechanisms behind the sexualized-body inversion hypothesis: The role of asymmetry and attention biases. PLOS ONE

Abstract

The current study aims to analyse VR measures in correspondence with 360° virtual affective experiences to understand the underlying spatio-temporal attention processes. We selected extreme pleasant and extreme unpleasant emotional videos from the Stanford affective database and displayed to participants on HMD VR. The participants’ task was to explore the video and report their affective experience using the Self- Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale. The exploration behaviour was analysed using head-tracking parameters, such as standard deviation of all the three head-rotation axes (yaw, pitch and roll), angular speed and region-wise analysis. We observed a positive correlation between standard deviation of yaw and valence, and angular speed and valence. The result suggests that affective experience not only increases the scope of attention spatially (wide scanning), it also motivates to seek more information that leads to more head-movement during exploration. In region- wise analysis, we observed front field-of-view was primarily explored, and rear field-of-view was least explored, showing natural responses similar to real environments. In addition, we used Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI) to assess participants’ emotional state, specifically depression symptoms. The relation between virtual affective experience and 360° exploration be- haviour is discussed in light of the BDI categories. The study findings broaden the scope for VR affective research by enabling psychomotor assessment in more ecologically valid settings. Index Terms—Emotion, Depression, Affective State, 360° Ex- ploration, Head-Tracking

Abstract

Recently, there has been research on what factors influence a user’s password setting practices, which include various types of emotions such as anger, risk-taking tendencies, etc. However, research has shown that factors such as memorability and perceived memorability have a greater influence on password choice. Some recent research has shown a negative correlation between the perceived memorability and the perceived security of passwords, particularly passphrases (that are technically more secure). However, it is unclear whether this effect can be extended to groups with good experiences with digital spaces (IT professionals, entrepreneurs, etc.). Furthermore, it has not been determined whether random, uncommonly-worded, or complex structure passphrases would also maintain the correlation, as opposed to relatively less secure, common/simple passphrases. This study examines this problem using a diverse demographic and different categories of passphrases. Keywords: Metacognition; Passwords; Perception; Memorability; Security

Abstract

Recently, there has been research on what factors influence a user’s password setting practices, which include various types of emotions such as anger, risk-taking tendencies, etc. How- ever, research has shown that factors such as memorability and perceived memorability have a greater influence on password choice. Some recent research has shown a negative correlation between the perceived memorability and the perceived secu- rity of passwords, particularly passphrases (that are technically more secure). However, it is unclear whether this effect can be extended to groups with good experiences with digital spaces (IT professionals, entrepreneurs, etc.). Furthermore, it has not been determined whether random, uncommonly-worded, or complex structure passphrases would also maintain the cor- relation, as opposed to relatively less secure, common/simple passphrases. This study examines this problem using a diverse demographic and different categories of passphrases. Keywords: Metacognition; Passwords; Perception; Memora- bility; Security

Abstract

Use of virtual reality (VR) technology is proliferating for designing and upgrading entertainment devices, and creating virtual environments that could be used for research and training. VR is becoming a strong research tool by providing a tighter control on the experimental environment and by allowing almost limitless possibilities of creating ecologically valid stimuli. However, the enhanced fidelity between the real and virtual worlds that VR provides does not always benefit human performance. For a better understanding, and increasing VR’s usability, we need to identify the relevant constituent components of immersive technologies, and differentiate their roles, for example, how visual and interaction fidelity differentially improves human performance. We conducted an experiment to examine how two common VR display modes, head mounted display (HMD) and desktop (DT), would affect spatial learning when we restrict ambulatory locomotion in HMD. This manipulation allowed examining the role of varying visual fidelity with low interaction fidelity. We used a between-group design with 40 naïve participants. They explored a virtual environment and later drew its sketch-map. Our results showed participants spent more time and perceived less motion-sickness and task effort using desktop than HMD VR. With reduced interaction fidelity, the high visual fidelity of HMD as compared to desktop resulted in similar or poorer performance on different spatial learning tasks after accounting for motion-sickness and workload effort. Participants were better in recalling spatial components related to junction and cyclic order of the navigated virtual space in …

Abstract

The current work assesses the physiological and psychological responses to the Stanford virtual reality (VR) affective database [1] of 360° emotional videos presented using head-mounted display (HMD). Participants were asked to rate the videos on arousal and valence using SAM scale after every video. The electro-dermal activity(EDA) was recorded while watching the videos. The current pilot study shows highest skin conductance response (SCR) for high arousal, and moderate arousal and moderate valence videos., and lowest SCR for high valence videos. Self-report on valence and arousal shows a difference between Stanford VR affective database and corresponding Indian population psychological responses, suggesting a role of social context in emotion perception and experience.

Abstract

Analytic reasoning differences, as gauged from intelligence metrics, in students engaged in streams requiring a predominantly divergent (arts) or convergent thinking (science and engineering) is a topic of interest. In this paper we have examined this difference by a modified sequence of two sections (D & E) of the Standard Ravens Progressive matrices (RPM). The scan path gaze behavior was analyzed with an eye tracker. The 30 engineering students (half of them are also trained in fine arts) scored higher than the 15 fine arts students. In the former cohort, the artistic and the non-artistic set show no difference in performance but the scan path, fixation count and time taken indicate possible differences in visual strategies for pattern identification. From the detailed analysis, we argue that intelligence as measured by RPM is enhanced by training in reasoning and logic as in engineering streams and might not reflect an innate ability

Abstract

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a disease which is widely diagnosed using (colour fundus) images. Efficiency and accuracy are critical in diagnosing DR as lack of timely intervention can lead to irreversible visual impairment. In this paper, we examine strategies for scrutinizing images which affect diagnostic performance of medical practitioners via an eye-tracking study. A total of 56 subjects with 0 to 18 years of experience participated in the study. Every subject was asked to detect DR from 40 images. The findings indicate that practitioners use mainly two types of strategies characterized by either higher dwell duration or longer track length. The main findings of the study are that higher dwell-based strategy led to higher average accuracy (> 85%) in diagnosis, irrespective of the expertise of practitioner; whereas, the average obtained accuracy with a long-track length-based strategy was dependent on the expertise of the practitioner. In the second part of the paper, we use the experimental findings to recommend a scanning strategy for fast and accurate diagnosis of DR that can be potentially used by image readers. This is derived by combining the eyetracking gaze maps of medical experts in a novel manner based on a set of rules. This strategy requires scrutiny of images in a manner which is consistent with spatial preferences found in human perception in general and in the domain of fundus images in particular. The Levenshtein distance-based assessment of gaze patterns also establish the effectiveness of the derived scanning pattern and is thus recommended for image readers.

Abstract

Previous research shows that performance is better when a high pitch is responded with up or right responses and a low pitch is responded with down or left responses, called the spatial-pitch association of response codes (SPARC) effect. Despite the intuitive coupling of perception-action, studies investigating the SPARC effect have, however, used feedback to manipulate the stimulus-response mapping. Feedback contradicts the purpose of intuitive stimulus-response mapping by enabling short-term learning. This study primarily investigates the role of feedback on SPARC effect. We believe that feedback can facilitate incongruent mapping and can, therefore, reduce the cost between incongruent and congruent mapping resulting in a diminished SPARC effect. Our results, however, show that feedback has no influence on the SPARC effect indicating that long-term associations can not be overcome by short-term learning due to robust perception-action coupling. Further, unlike previous studies, we observed a strong horizontal SPARC effect in nonmusicians as well.