When designing websites or applications, being able to allocate visual attention to specific parts of an interface is important. One powerful tool that can be used for this is Gaze Cues, which is a social cue that makes use of gaze direction to allocate visual attention in the same direction. Gaze mechanisms such as gaze cues have been tested on virtual characters, also known as avatars, and show potential. This study aims to compare how gaze cues with avatars allocate visual attention compared to gaze cues with humans. An eye tracking case study with 30 participants was conducted, with gaze cues presented from either avatars or humans, measuring time to first fixations on a certain object. In combination with post-session interviews, results showed that there was no significant difference if the stimulus that presented the gaze cue was human or avatar. These results imply that avatars can make use of gaze cues as effectively as humans, to allocate visual attention in settings where they appear such as video games, animated series and/or animated movies. / Vid design av hemsidor och applikationer, är det viktigt att kunna dra visuell uppmärksamhet till specifika delar av ett gränssnitt. Blickar är ett kraftfullt verktyg som kan användas för att skapa en social signal som använder riktningen av blickar för att leda visuell uppmärksamhet i samma riktning. Olika blickmekanismer har testats på virtuella karaktärer, eller avatarer, och påvisar potential. Denna studie fokuserar på att jämföra hur blickar med avatarer drar visuell uppmärksamhet i jämförelse med mänskliga blickar. En eye tracking studie med 30 deltagare hölls, med blickar som presenterades av antingen avatarer eller människor, med tiden till första fixering på ett visst objekt som mått. I kombination med efterföljande intervjuer, visade resultaten att det inte fanns någon signifikant skillnad ifall stimulen som presenterade blickarna var människa eller avatar. Utifrån dessa resultat kan man se att avatarer kan utnyttja blickar lika effektivt som människor kan för att leda visuell uppmärksamhet i miljöer där de förekommer, såsom datorspel, animerade serier och/eller animerade filmer.

Eye tracking-teknologi har blivit mer och mer populärt att använda inom user experience-forskning med åren. I den här studien undersöks hur forskare väljer att visualisera eye tracking-data, vad dessa visualiseringar fyller för syfte och hur de skapades. Målet med studien är att identifiera hur forskare inom området motiverar deras val av visualiseringsmetod och om de redogör för hur de genererat deras figurer för visualisering. Studien är en litteraturstudie där artiklar har analyserats för att hitta jämförbar data. Alla artiklar är relaterade till user experience och har utfört sina studier med hjälp av eye tracking-teknologi. Deras eye tracking data samlas från webbaserade plattformar och visualiserasgenom figurer inkluderade i texterna. Resultat visar att samtliga studier inte motiverar deras val av visualiseringsmetod eller redogör på ett tydligt sätt hur de skapat visualiseringar. Samtliga studier gör också antaganden och slutsatser om användarupplevelsen av deras gränssnitt baserat på deras respektive visualiseringar trots att skapandet av visualiseringar inte redogjorts. / Eye tracking-technology has become increasingly popular to use in user experience research over the years. This study examines how researchers choose to visualize eye tracking-data, the purposes these visualizations serve, and how they were created. The aim of the study is to identify how researchers in the field justify their choice of visualization method and whether they explain how they generated their figures for visualization. The study is a literature review where articles have been analyzed to find comparable data. All articles are related to user experience and have conducted their studies utilizing eye tracking-technology. Their eye tracking data is collected from web-based platforms and visualized through figures included in the texts. The results show that none of the studies justify their choice of visualization method or clearly explain how they created their visualizations. All studies also make assumptions and draw conclusions about the user experience of their interfaces based on their respective visualizations, despite not providing details about the creation of said visualizations.

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There is a lot of research conducted on how vehicle drivers become worse when they sleep less. A vehicle driver who sleeps for six hours is 30% more likely to be responsible for vehicle accident, which makes a strict application of the Swedish armed forces rules for drivers rest (6 hours) dangerous. The research conducted on vehicle drivers is made in civilian envionments or in laboratory environments, not military environments. The military environment, wether it is in war zones or during field exercises, will lead to increased stress and poorer sleep for the individual. No research is currently conducted on how military drivers ability to operate a vehicle is affected by the military environment. This thesis aim is to explore this gap in research.  The research question is ‘Does military personnel sleep enough to safely operate a vehicle in a military environment?’. The question is asked in the context of military environments and is answered by conducting experiments on conscripted soldiers who operate a vehicle while conducting a field exercise. The experiment uses 5 participants who drive for 45 minutes along a highway at three separate occasions. The participants are analyzed with an eye tracking system, which assess wether or not the participant is fatigued or distracted.  The result did not give a conclusive answer. At the first occasion all participants participated in the experiment, the results where that they had increased fatigued for 19,8% of the time they spent operating the vehicle. During occasion 2/3 there were three participants of 5, where from only two participants could be used. The results shows that the participant experience drivers fatigue earlier at later occasions, but never so fatigued as to pose a traffic safety risk. This result is wildly inconclusive due to the low participation rate of occasion 2 and 3. When the participants had sun in their eyes the eye tracking system seems prone to assess the participants as more fatigued than they are. The conclusions from this experiment is that more data is needed to draw any conclusions of quality, but it seems as though the participants become more fatigued earlier the longer they are in a military environment. / Det finns mycket forskning som fokuserar på hur mycket sämre trötta förare är när de kör bil. En förare som har sovit i sex timmar har 30% högre sannolikhet att vara ansvarig för en trafikolycka, vilket gör Försvarsmaktens lägsta nivå för förarvila (6 timmar) farlig. Den forskning som genomförs på fordonsförare är gjord på förare i civila miljöer eller i labbmiljöer, inte  i militära miljöer. Den militära miljön, oavsett om det är i krigszoner eller under fältövningar, kommer bidra till ökad stress och sämre sömn för individer. Ingen forskning är i nuläget gjord på hur militära förares framförande av fordon påverkas av den militära miljön. Denna uppsats utforskar denna forskningslucka. Frågeställningen är  ’Sover militära förare tillräckligt mycket för att kunna framföra ett fordon säkert i militär miljö?[KE1] ’. Frågan ställs i föhållande till den miljön som militärer är i och besvaras genom experiment där värnpliktiga förare framför ett fordon när de genomför en fältövning. Experimentet går ut på att fem deltagare kör en personbil i ca 45 minuter längs med en motorväg vid tre tillfällen. Deltagarna analyseras med hjälp av ett eye tracking system, som bedömer hur trötta förarna är och om de är distraherade när de kör. Resultatet gav inte ett entydigt svar. Vid tillfälle 1 deltog samtliga fem deltagare och resultatet gav i genomsnitt att förarna hade förhöjda trötthetsnivåer 19,8% av körtiden. Vid tillfälle 2 och tillfälle 3 kunde endast data från två deltagare användas varav tre deltagare deltog. Datan från tillfälle 2 och 3 pekar på att förarna blev tröttare, men var aldrig farligt trötta under en längre period. På grund av begränsad mängd data kan inga definitiva  slutsatser dras av resultatet. När deltagarna hade sol i ögonen verkade systemet analysera förarna som mer trötta än vad de faktiskt är. Slutsatserna från detta experiment är att mer data behövs för att dra säkra slutsatser, men att det verkar som att förare blir tröttare när de kör bil ju längre in i övningen de kommer.  [KE1]otydligt med en retorisk fråga och titeln på arbetet kopplat mot frågeställningen.

Smooth tracking and efficient reaching for moving objects require the ability to predict the velocity and trajectory of the object. This skill is important to be able to perceive human action and object motion in the world. This thesis explores early visual motor development in full term and preterm infants. Study I showed that horizontal eye tracking develops ahead of vertical (full term infants at 5, 7 and 9 months of age). The vertical component is also more affected when a second dimension is added during circular pursuit. It is concluded that different mechanisms appear to underlie vertical and horizontal eye movements Study II-IV compared the development of the ability to visually track and reach for moving objects in very preterm infants born <32 gestational weeks to healthy infants born at term. The development of horizontal smooth pursuit at 2 and 4 months of corrected age was delayed for the preterm group (Study II). Some infants were catching up whereas others were not improving at all. A question raised by the results was whether the delay was caused by specific injuries as a result of the prematurity. However, the delays persisted when all infants with known neonatal complications and infants born small for gestational age were excluded (Study III), indicating that they were caused by prematurity per se. At 8 months corrected age preterm and full term infants were equally good at aiming reaches and successfully catching a moving object. Nevertheless, the preterm group used a bimanual strategy more often and had a more jerky and circuitous path than the full term group (Study IV). In summary, preterm infants showed a delayed visual motor development compared to infants born at term. The results of these studies suggest that there is additional diffuse damage to the visual motor system that is not related to neonatal complications as diagnosed today. Measuring smooth pursuit could potentially be a new method for early non-invasive diagnosis of impaired visual function.

This thesis is a single case study of the introduction and evaluation of new resources and new technologies in higher education; in which e-Proof was chosen as a single case. E-proofs are a multimedia representation of proofs, were created by Alcock (2009), and aimed to help undergraduates to read proofs for better proof comprehension. My thesis aimed to investigate whether the impact of reading such technology-based resource, e-Proofs, on undergraduates proof comprehension was better compared to reading written textbook proofs and if so, then why (or why not). To evaluate the effectiveness of e-Proofs, I used both qualitative and quantitative methods. First I measured undergraduates satisfaction, which is a most common research practice in evaluation studies, by using self-reporting methods such as web-based survey and interviews. A web-based survey and focus-group interviews showed that undergraduates liked to have e-Proofs and they believed that e-Proofs had positive impact on their proof comprehension. However, their positive views on e-Proofs did not evidence the educational impact of e-Proofs. I conducted an interview with Alcock for better understanding of her intentions of creating e-Proof and her expectations from it. Next, I conducted the first experiment which compared the impact of reading an e-Proof with a written textbook proof on undergraduates proof comprehension. Their comprehension was measured with an open-ended comprehension test twice immediately after reading the proof and after two weeks. I found that the immediate impact of reading an e-Proof and a textbook proof were essentially the same, however the long term impact of reading an e-Proof was worse than reading a textbook proof (for both high and low achieving undergraduates). This leads to the second experiment in which I investigated how undergraduates read e-Proofs and textbook proofs. In the second experiment, participants eye-movements were recorded while read- ing proofs, to explore their reading comprehension processes. This eye-tracking experiment showed that undergraduates had a sense of understanding of how to read a proof without any additional help. Rather, additional help allowed them to take a back seat and to devote less cognitive effort than they would otherwise. Moreover, e-Proofs altered undergraduates reading behaviours in a way which can harm learning. In sum, this thesis contributes knowledge into the area of reading and compre- hending proofs at undergraduate level and presents a methodology for evaluation studies of new pedagogical tools.

Empirical studies have shown that learning from worked examples is an effective learning strategy. A worked example provides step-by-step explanations of how a problem is solved. Many studies have compared learning from examples to unsupported problem solving, and suggested presenting worked examples to students in the initial stages of learning, followed by problem solving once students have acquired enough knowledge. Recently, researchers have started comparing learning from examples to supported problem solving in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). ITSs provide multiple levels of assistance to students, adaptive feedback being one of them. The goal of this research is to investigate using examples in constraint-based tutors by adding examples into SQL-Tutor. SQL-Tutor is a constraint-based tutor that teaches the Structured Query Language (SQL). Students with different prior knowledge benefit differently from studying examples; thus, another goal of the research is to propose an adaptive model that considers the student’s prior knowledge for providing worked examples. Evaluation of this research produced promising results. First, a fixed sequence of alternating examples and problems was compared with problems only and examples only. The result shows that alternating examples and problems is superior to the other two conditions. Then, a study was conducted, in which a fixed sequence of alternating worked examples and tutored problem solving is compared with a strategy that adapts the assistance level to students’ needs. The adaptive strategy determines the type of the task (a worked example, a faded example or a problem to be solved) based on how much assistance the student received in the previous problem. The results show that students in the adaptive condition learnt significantly more than their peers who were presented with the fixed sequence of worked examples and problem solving. The final study employed eye tracking and demonstrated that novices and advanced students study SQL examples differently. Such information can be used to provide proactive rather than reactive feedback messages to students’ actions.

Screening individuals for concealed knowledge has traditionally been the purview of professional interrogators investigating a crime. But the ability to detect when a person is hiding important information would be of high value to many other fields and functions. This dissertation proposes design principles for and reports on an implementation and empirical evaluation of a non-invasive, automated system for human screening. The screening system design (termed an automated screening kiosk or ASK) is patterned after a standard interviewing method called the Concealed Information Test (CIT), which is built on theories explaining psychophysiological and behavioral effects of human orienting and defensive responses. As part of testing the ASK proof of concept, I propose and empirically examine alternative indicators of concealed knowledge in a CIT. Specifically, I propose kinesic rigidity as a viable cue, propose and instantiate an automated method for capturing rigidity, and test its viability using a traditional CIT experiment. I also examine oculomotor behavior using a mock security screening experiment using an ASK system design. Participants in this second experiment packed a fake improvised explosive device (IED) in a bag and were screened by an ASK system. Results indicate that the ASK design, if implemented within a highly controlled framework such as the CIT, has potential to overcome barriers to more widespread application of concealed knowledge testing in government and business settings.

Past research has shown that the processing of emotional visual stimuli and visual attention are tightly linked together. In particular, emotional stimuli processing can modulate attention, and, reciprocally, the processing of emotional stimuli can be facilitated or inhibited by attentional processes. However, our understanding of these interactions is still limited, with much work remaining to be done to understand the characteristics of this reciprocal interaction and the different mechanisms that are at play. This thesis presents a series of experiments which use eye-tracking, behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) methods in order to better understand these interactions from a cognitive and neuroscientific point of view. First, the influence of emotional stimuli on eye movements, reflecting overt attention, was investigated. While it is known that the emotional gist of images attracts the eye (Calvo and Lang, 2004), little is known about the influence of emotional content on eye movements in more complex visual environments. Using eye-tracking methods, and by adapting a paradigm originally used to study the influence of semantic inconsistencies in scenes (Loftus and Mackworth, 1978), we found that participants spend more time fixating emotional than neutral targets embedded in visual scenes, but do not fixate them earlier. Emotional targets in scenes were therefore found to hold, but not to attract, the eye. This suggests that due to the complexity of the scenes and the limited processing resources available, the emotional information projected extra-foveally is not processed in such a way that it drives eye movements. Next, in order to better characterise the exogenous deployment of covert attention toward emotional stimuli, a sample of sub-clinically anxious individuals was studied. Anxiety is characterised by a reflexive attentional bias toward threatening stimuli. A dot-probe task (MacLeod et al., 1986) was designed to replicate and extend past findings of this attentional bias. In particular, the experiment was designed to test whether the bias was caused by faster reaction times to fear-congruent probes or slower reaction times to neutral-congruent probes. No attentional bias could be measured. A further analysis of the literature suggests that subliminal cue stimulus presentation, as used in our case, may not generate reliable attentional biases, unlike longer cue presentations. This would suggest that while emotional stimuli can be processed without awareness, further processing may be necessary to trigger reflexive attentional shifts in anxiety. Then the time-course of emotional stimulus processes and its modulation by attention was investigated. Modulations of the very early visual ERP C1 component by emotional stimuli (e.g. Pourtois et al., 2004; Stolarova et al., 2006), but also by visual attention (Kelly et al., 2008), were reported in the literature. A series of three experiments were performed, investigating the interactions between endogenous covert spatial attention and object-based attention with emotional stimuli processing in the C1 time window (50–100 ms). It was found that emotional stimuli modulated the C1 only when they were spatially attended and task-irrelevant. This suggests that whilst spatial attention gates emotional facial processing from the earliest stages, only incidental processing triggers a specific response before 100 ms. Additionally, the results suggest a very early modulation by feature-based attention which is independent from spatial attention. Finally, simulated and actual electroencephalographic data were used to show that modulations of early ERP and event-related field (ERF) components are highly dependent on the high-pass filter used in the pre-processing stage. A survey of the literature found that a large part of ERP/ERF reports (about 40%) use high-pass filters that may bias the results. More particularly, a large proportion of papers reporting very early modulations also use such filters. Consequently, a large part of the literature may need to be re-assessed. The work described in this thesis contributes to a better understanding of the links between emotional stimulus processing and attention at different levels. Using various experimental paradigms, this work confirms that emotional stimuli processing is not ‘automated’, but highly dependent on the focus of attention, even at the earlier stages of visual processing. Furthermore, the uncovered potential bias generated by filtering will help to improve the reliability and precision of research in the ERP/ERF field, and more particularly in studies looking at early effects.

The aims of the current program of research were to examine the impact of anxiety on performance and attentional control during the execution of two far aiming tasks, and to examine the efficacy of gaze training interventions in mediating these effects. Attentional control theory (ACT), which suggests that anxious individuals have impaired goal-directed attentional control, was adopted as a theoretical framework, and the Quiet Eye, characterised by long final fixations on relevant locations, was adopted as an objective measure of overt attentional control. In Studies 1 and 2 increased pressure impaired goal directed attentional control (QE) at the expense of stimulus-driven control (more fixations of shorter duration to various targets). The aim of studies 3 and 4 was therefore to examine the efficacy of an intervention designed to train effective visual attentional control (QE training) for novices, and determine whether such training protected against attentional disruptions associated with performing under pressure. In both studies the QE trained group maintained more effective visual attentional control and performed significantly better in a subsequent pressure test compared to the Control group, providing support for the efficacy of attentional training for visuo-motor skills. The aim of study 5 was to examine the effectiveness of a brief QE training intervention for elite golfers and to examine if potential benefits shown for novices in studies 3 and 4 transferred to competitive play. The QE-trained group maintained their optimal QE and performance under pressure conditions, whereas the control group experienced reductions in QE and performance. Importantly, these advantages transferred to the golf course, where QE-trained golfers reduced their putts per round by 1.9 putts, compared to pre-training, whereas the control group showed no change in their putting statistics. This series of studies has therefore implicated the role of attention in the breakdown of performance under pressure, but has also suggested that visual attentional training regimes may be a useful technique for alleviating this problem.