Twelve spatial-cueing experiments examined stimulus-driven and goal-driven control of visual attention orienting under multiple-cue conditions. Spatial cueing involves presenting a cue at a potential target location before a target appears in a display, and measuring the cue's effect on responses to the target stimulus. Under certain conditions, a cue that appears abruptly in a display (direct cue) can speed responses to a target appearing at the previously cued location relative to other uncued locations (called the cue effect). The experiments in this dissertation used a new multiple-cue procedure to decouple the effects of stimulus-driven and goal-driven processes on the control of attention. This technique involved simultaneously presenting a red direct cue (Unique Cue) that was highly predictive of the target location along with multiple grey direct cues (Standard Cues) that were not predictive of the target location. The basic finding was that while cue effects occurred at all cued locations, they were significantly larger at the Unique-Cue location. This finding was interpreted as evidence for stimulus-driven cue effects at all cued locations with additional goal-driven cue effects at the Unique-Cue location. Further experiments showed that Standard-Cue effects could occur independently at multiple locations, that they seemed to involve a sensory-based interaction between the cues and the target, and that they were mediated by a limitedcapacity tracking mechanism. In addition, Unique-Cue effects were found to be the product of goal-driven operations, to interact with Standard-Cue effects, and to involve inhibited processing at unattended locations. These results were explained in terms of a filter-based model of attention control that assigns priority to potential attention-shift destinations. According to this model, stimulus-driven and goal-driven factors generate signals (activity distributions) that drive a filter to open an attention channel at the highest priority location by suppressing the signals at other locations. The final experiments confirmed the central assumptions of this model by providing evidence that the prioritydestination process was sufficient to produce cue effects independent of attention, and that attending to a location involved a suppression of processing at unattended locations. The implications of this model for the larger visual attention literature were also discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Broadcasts and timelines are the primary mechanism of information exchange in online social platforms today. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have enabled ordinary people to reach large audiences spanning cultures and countries, while their massive popularity has created increasingly competitive marketplaces of attention. Timing broadcasts to capture the attention of such geographically diverse audiences has sparked interest from many startups and social marketing gurus. However, formal study is lacking on both the timing and frequency problems. In this thesis, we introduce, motivate and solve the broadcast scheduling problem of specifying the timing and frequency of publishing content to maximise the attention received. We validate and quantify three interacting behavioural phenomena to parametrise social platform users: information overload, bursty circadian rhythms and monotony aversion, which is defined here for the first time. Our analysis of the influence of monotony refutes the common assumption that posts on social network timelines are consumed piecemeal independently. Instead, we reveal that posts are consumed in chunks, which has important consequences for any future work considering human behaviour over social network timelines. Our quantification of monotony aversion is also novel, and has applications to problems in various domains such as recommender list diversification, user satiation and variety-seeking consumer behaviour. Having studied the underlying behavioural phenomena, we link schedules, timelines, attention and behaviour by formalising a timeline information exchange process. Our formulation gives rise to a natural objective function that quantifies the expected collective attention an arrangement of posts on a timeline will receive. We apply this formulation as a case-study on real-data from Twitter, where we estimate behavioural parameters, calculate the attention potential for different scheduling strategies and, using the method of marginal allocation, discover a new scheduling strategy that outperforms popular scheduling heuristics while producing fewer posts.

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The only way to simplify and promote the effective use of an alerting system that must be comprehensive in its coverage of hazardous or non-normal conditions is to convey top level information that provides an indication of criticality and identity. In an attempt to reduce the number of aural alerting signals presented in aircraft flight decks, this investigation pursued advances toward the development of a simple aural alert categorization scheme that provides flight deck function and urgency level information. In Experiment 1, 20 subjects having "normal" hearing threshold levels provided magnitude estimation urgency ratings for a series of aural alerts. These ratings revealed that subjects perceived low, moderate, and high urgency levels within each of four equally urgent aural alerting sets. In Experiment 2, 12 subjects having "normal" hearing threshold levels participated in a brief training session and then performed a sound identification task in conjunction with an automated and manual tracking task. Sound identification data revealed that subjects correctly identified the alerting set (i.e., major flight deck function) and urgency level associated with each of 12 aural alerts in 96.53% of the trials occurring during automated tracking and in 95.83% of the trials occurring during manual tracking; furthermore, subjects correctly identified each alerting set, urgency level, and aural alert equally often during each tracking task condition. Electroencephalogram (EEG) data recorded throughout the performance of each tracking task condition revealed that manual tracking required a significantly higher level of attentional engagement than automated tracking. Subjective assessments of workload collected after the performance of each tracking task condition revealed that a significantly higher level of workload was experienced during the manual condition of the tracking task than during the automated condition of the tracking task. Collectively, this investigation's results indicated that acoustic parameter manipulations can be used to create four distinctive alerting sets that each convey three levels of urgency and that these alerting sets and urgency levels can be accurately identified when two levels of workload and attentional engagement are experienced. / Ph. D.

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This study focuses on the use of a humanoid robot to facilitate the initiation of social engagement behaviors in two children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Approximately 10 minutes of a 50-minute treatment session were devoted to interaction using a humanoid robot, Troy, to facilitate interactions with a graduate clinician or caretaker. These interactions were recorded, analyzed, and coded in 5 s intervals. This study focused specifically on the children's initiations of social engagement behaviors. Results suggested that the robot had potential to facilitate social engagement between the children and the adults.

Inattentive behavior is considered a core and pervasive feature of ADHD; however, an alternative model challenges this premise and hypothesizes a functional relationship between working memory and inattentive behavior. The current study investigated whether inattentive behavior in children with ADHD is functionally related to domain-general central executive and/or subsidiary storage/rehearsal components of working memory. Objective observations of children's attentive behavior by independent observers were conducted while children with ADHD (n=15) and typically developing children (n=14) completed 10 counterbalanced tasks that differentially manipulated central executive, phonological storage/rehearsal, and visuospatial storage/rehearsal demands. Results of latent variable and effect size confidence interval analyses revealed two conditions that completely accounted for the attentive behavior deficits in children with ADHD: (a) placing demands on central executive processing, the effe