Browsing by Subject "Eye-tracking"
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Item Analyses of gaze in music tasks : score reading and observations of instrumental performance(2019-09-24) Hicken, Laura Kathryn; Duke, Robert A.; Hayhoe, Mary M; Jellison, Judith A; Scott, Laurie P; Simmons, Amy LThe optimal allocation of attention is a central feature of expert music teachers’ capacity to create meaningful change in student performances. Experts consistently identify the most important components of relevant behavior, and then direct learners’ attention in ways that bring about productive changes in thinking and motor control. In this dissertation, the eye movements of music teachers with varied levels of experience and expertise were analyzed in two different contexts: music score-reading, and observation of human motor behavior in music and nonmusic settings. In one experiment, faculty, graduate-, and undergraduate-level conductors read excerpts from one familiar and one unfamiliar instrumental music score while listening to a metronome set to the tempo of the musical pulse in each piece and again while listening to audio recordings of the music. Expert score reading was characterized by frequent musically relevant (informative) fixations that were timed consistently ahead of the ongoing music. Experts also fixated more lines the music texture than did nonexperts, perhaps an indication of their internal perception of the entirety of the excerpts they read. Less experienced participants fixated many more irrelevant targets and often fixated behind the ongoing music in time. Less experienced participants also tended to follow individual lines in the score, especially in the unfamiliar excerpt, and this narrow visual focus may be an indication of limitations in their ability to hear or imagine all components of the music simultaneously. In a second experiment, artist-faculty, graduate-, and undergraduate-level flute players observed six video recordings of individual performers playing flute, clarinet, and saxophone, and three recordings of individuals juggling, batting a baseball, and dancing ballet. Experts’ mean fixation durations were substantially longer during the flute, clarinet, and saxophone videos than were the nonexperts’. Experts also devoted more fixation time to the embouchure in the music videos, perhaps noting the dynamics of the embouchure over time. Nonexperts also fixated the embouchures, but looked at other targets as well; their fixations tended to be shorter than the experts’. The results of these two studies reveal expert music teachers’ clarity and intentionality in directing attention to the most informative aspects of their environment, and demonstrate how fixation duration varies in relation to the task at hand. In the case of music score reading (i.e., viewing static images), experts tended to fixate for shorter durations than did nonexperts, and the scan paths of experts indicated attention to multiple voices in the music texture. In observations of human behavior, music performance behavior in particular, experts fixated for longer durations, focusing on the most important features of performers behavior as they developed over time.Item Dynamics and outcomes of strategies used for prospective remembering(2020-09-17) Koslov, Seth Ryan; Lewis-Peacock, Jarrod A.; Preston, Alison R; Schnyer, David M; Scullin, Michael KProspective memory (PM) is our ability to remember to perform actions at specific times in the future despite other concurrent demands for our attention. Previous research has posited that there are two dissociable strategies that individuals use when trying to perform PM tasks: proactive and reactive control. Proactive control is characterized by the effortful processes of strategic monitoring of the environment for cues related to performing prospective intentions as well as maintaining a sustained representation of the PM-intention. Conversely, reactive control is characterized by the formation of cue-intention associations, which are stored in episodic memory until a cue in the environment triggers the spontaneous retrieval of the to-be-performed action. While previous research has been instrumental in dissociating these two PM strategies, we still do not know the manner in which individuals shift between strategies. Furthermore, little is known about how PM strategy flexibility influences our ability to carry out future intentions. The work in this dissertation investigated how individuals adjust PM strategy in response to environmental demands and how that flexibility relates to the subsequent ability to perform PM intentions. The work presented in this dissertation investigated the relationship between PM strategy, ongoing demands, and PM performance across three experiments. The first experiment investigated if and how individuals adjust PM strategy as ongoing demands gradually increased or decreased, and how those shifts related to subsequent PM performance. Results indicated that individuals adjusted their PM strategy in a fluid manner in response to changes in ongoing task demands. Additionally, these changes were adaptive, as they were related to subsequent PM performance. Experiment 2 investigated how strategy flexibility was related to the probability of a PM-event occurring. Results from that experiment revealed that individuals demonstrated greater shifts in PM strategy when the probability of a PM event was high compared to when it was low. Additionally, it was observed that adaptive strategy use was often related to better PM performance. In experiment 3, eye-tracking was used to more specifically characterize the monitoring component of proactive control, specifically relating eye-tracking measures to the oft used behavioral measure used to infer PM strategy, PM cost. Results from the experiment revealed that the relationship between strategic monitoring and PM costs shifted as a function of ongoing task difficulty, with costs being more closely related to measures of strategic monitoring when ongoing demands were low than when they were high. Additionally, the results indicated that while monitoring was important for prospective remembering, it did not fully explain subsequent PM performance differences. Overall, the results from these three experiments demonstrate that individuals do gradually and fluidly adjust the amount of effortful resources devoted towards prospective remembering in response to demands of the environment. Furthermore, these results extend our knowledge of how individuals implement strategy shifts, as well as our understanding of how shifts in strategy serve adaptive purposes.Item The influence of food and beverage advertising on youth : an eye-tracking approach(2012-05) Velazquez, Cayley Erin; Pasch, Keryn E.; Bartholomew, John; Loukas, Alexandra; Mackert, Michael; Perry, Cheryl L.Overweight and obesity are influenced by many factors, however, food and beverage advertising and its influence on the dietary preferences and choices of youth is important. Models providing explanations for the association between advertising and youth outcomes have been proposed, yet few have been tested. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how objective measures of attention to food and beverage advertising were associated with the (1) unhealthy food and beverage preferences (2) unhealthy food and beverage choices and (3) overweight/obesity status of youth, and how susceptibility to food and beverage advertising moderated these associations. Participants included 102 youth (m age = 11.6; 56.4% Caucasian; 43.1% female) who viewed 40 food and beverage advertisements on a computer and had their eye movements recorded. Attention measures included total time, total unhealthy time, fixation length (animated characters/branded logos, unhealthy food and beverage items), and fixation count (animated characters/branded logos, unhealthy food and beverage items). Participants self-reported susceptibility to food and beverage advertising, unhealthy food and beverage preferences, unhealthy food and beverage choices, and overweight/obesity. Regression models, controlling for gender, and moderation analyses were conducted. Fixation length and count for unhealthy food and beverage items were each positively and significantly associated with unhealthy food and beverage preferences. Fixation count for unhealthy food and beverage items was positively and marginally associated with unhealthy food and beverage choices. Findings indicate that individuals who look longer and more frequently at unhealthy food and beverage items appear to prefer them, and may also choose them. Susceptibility to food and beverage advertising moderated the association between fixation count for animated characters/branded logos and BMI z-score, suggesting that under conditions of high susceptibility to food and beverage advertising, those with a higher fixation count for animated characters/branded logos had a lower BMI z-score. Future research should include longitudinal studies, as well as work which examines the role of other potential moderating variables. Findings may have important implications for use in intervention programs, in the development of advertising messages for healthy food and beverage items, and/or policy initiatives aimed at changing the landscape of food and beverage advertising.Item Predictive use of matched and mismatched gender-marked articles in Spanish-English bilinguals(2018-12) Baron, Alisa; Henry, Maya; Bedore, Lisa M.; Griffin, Zenzi; Peña, ElizabethMost behavioral research involving typically-developing children has been devoted to understanding language production processes, but there is limited information on language comprehension; thus, part of the developmental picture is incomplete. Although there is a growing body of literature focusing on production of grammatical forms for bilingual children, there is a critical need to understand how children’s comprehension skills develop in conjunction with production skills by understanding their language knowledge and language experience. With regard to grammatical class, articles are especially important because they precede nouns in most contexts in Spanish and therefore are used with a high frequency in all aspects of language. Articles should be studied in the language processing of elementary age children to understand what children attend to during language comprehension. In this study, the visual world paradigm was used to examine gendered articles using phonological competitors in trials with informative (different-gender grammatical trials), uninformative (same-gender grammatical trials), or incorrect (ungrammatical trials) articles in bilingual children and adults. Participants named common nouns and completed an eye-tracking task, a grammaticality judgment task, and a standardized vocabulary test in both English and Spanish. Bilingual children ages 5-6 and 8-9 did not show gender sensitivity in informative vs. uninformative trials but were significantly slower on ungrammatical trials. Bilingual adults showed sensitivity to gender and were significantly faster on informative trials relative to uninformative trials, which in turn were significantly faster than ungrammatical trials regardless of participants’ profile of current Spanish language input. Children may be merging their representation of articles in the two languages and not find the gender cue in Spanish to be necessary. Spanish, a gendered language and English, a non-gendered language, may be in competition during this developmental period. Bilingual adults are able to quickly and accurately process the incoming gendered information, and are therefore able to demonstrate gender sensitivity.Item The effects of speaking style, noise, and semantic context on speech segmentation : evidence from artificial language learning and eye-tracking experiments(2023-07-19) Guo, Zhe-chen; Smiljanic, Rajka, 1967-; Zellou, Georgia; Myers, Scott; Llanos Lucas, FernandoThis dissertation reports a series of three experimental studies that investigated how variation in speech clarity and intelligibility as well as the presence of semantic context affects listeners’ speech segmentation. An artificial language learning experiment in Study 1 (Chapter 2) showed that speaking clearly relative to speaking conversationally improved segmentation of nonsense words by statistical learning. However, the improvement was observed only in the quiet listening condition but not in noise. Using the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, Study 2 (Chapter 3) examined the clear speech segmentation benefit during real-time processing of meaningful sentences in which the target word was temporarily ambiguous with a competitor across a word boundary. The results revealed that that relative to conversational speech, clear speech facilitated target word segmentation even before the target and competitor could be disambiguated based on phonemic information. The facilitation not only emerged in quiet but also extended to the noisy listening condition. Finally, built upon Study 2, Study 3 (Chapter 4) employed eye-tracking to further explore how such clear speech facilitation effect is modulated by semantic cues from the preceding context. It was found that while the clear speech segmentation benefit was eliminated when the context already biased listeners towards the target, it was still present when the context favored the unintended competitor. Taken together, the key findings from the three studies advance the understanding of the relative importance of signal-dependent and signal-independent sources of information during segmentation in realistic communicative settings. The results also provide novel insight into the well-documented clear speech processing benefits by demonstrating that improved segmentation may in part underlie these benefits. The dissertation also has theoretical implications, suggesting directions for refining the current spoken word recognition and segmentation models.