The aim of this thesis is to investigate the effect of parafoveal information on central word processing. This topic impacts on two controversial areas of research: the allocation of attention during reading, and letter processing during word recognition. Researchers into the role of attention during reading are split into two camps, with some believing that attention is allocated serially to consecutive words and others that it is spread across multiple words in parallel. This debate has been informed by the results of recent experiments that test a key prediction of the parallel processing theory that parafoveal and foveal processing occur concurrently. However, there is a gap in the literature for tightly-controlled experiments to further test this prediction. In contrast, the study of the processing that letters undergo during word recognition has a long history, with many researchers concluding that letter identity is processed only conjointly with letter ‘slot’ position within a word, known as ‘slot-based’ coding. However, recent innovative studies have demonstrated that more word priming is produced from prime letter strings containing letter transpositions than from primes containing letter substitutions, although this work has not been extended to parafoveal letter prime presentations. This thesis will also discuss the neglected subject of how research into these separate topics of text reading and isolated word recognition can be integrated via parafoveal processing. It presents six experiments designed to investigate how our responses to a central word are affected by varying its relationship with simultaneously presented parafoveal information. Experiment 1 introduced the Flanking Letters Lexical Decision task in which a lexical decision was made to words flanked by bigrams either orthographically related or unrelated to the response word; the results indicated that there is parafoveal orthographic priming but did not support the ‘slot-based’ coding theory as letter order was unimportant. Experiments 2-4 involved eye-tracking of participants who read sentences containing a boundary change that allowed the presentation of an orthographically related word in parafoveal vision. Experiment 2 demonstrated that an orthographically related word at position n+1 reduces first-pass fixations on word n, indicating parallel processing of these words. Experiment 4 replicated this result, and also showed that altering the letter identity of word n+1 reduced orthographic priming whereas altering letter order did not, indicating that slot-based coding of letters does not occur during reading. However, Experiment 3 found that an orthographically related word presented at position n-1 did not prime word n, signifying the influence of reading direction on parafoveal processing. Experiment 5 investigated whether the parallel processing that words undergo during text reading conditions our representations of isolated words; lexical decision times to words flanked by bigrams that formed plausible or implausible contexts did not differ. Lastly, one possible cause of the reading disorder dyslexia is under- or over- processing of parafoveal information. Experiment 6 therefore replicated Experiment 1 including a sample of dyslexia sufferers but found no interaction between reading ability and parafoveal processing. Overall, the results of this thesis lead to the conclusion that there is extensive processing of parafoveal information during both reading (indicating parallel processing) and word recognition (contraindicating slot-based coding), and that underpinning both our reading and word recognition processes is the flexibility of our information-gathering mechanisms.

The present four studies are the first to examine the effect of presentation time on accurate facial expression discrimination while concurrently using eye movement monitoring to ensure fixation to specific features during the brief presentation of the entire face. Recent studies using backward masking and evaluating accuracy performance with signal detection methods (A’) have identified a happy-face advantage however differences between other facial expressions of emotion have not been reported. In each study, a specific exposure time before mask (150, 100, 50, or 16.67 ms) and eight different fixation locations were used during the presentation of neutral, disgusted, fearful, happy, and surprised expressions. An effect of emotion was found across all presentation times such that the greatest performance was seen for happiness, followed by neutral, disgust, surprise, and with the lowest performances seen for fear. Fixation to facial features specific to an emotion did not improve performance and did not account for the differences in accuracy performance between emotions. Rather, results suggest that accuracy performance depends on the integration of facial features, and that this varies across emotions and with presentation time.

Value based decisions are among the most common types of decisions made by humans. A considerable body of work has investigated how different types of information guide such decisions, as well as how evaluations of their outcomes retroactively inform the parameters that were used to inform them. Several open questions remain regarding the nature of the underlying representations of decision-relevant information. Of particular relevance is whether or not positive and negative information (i.e. rewards/gains vs. punishments/losses/costs) are treated as categorically distinct, or whether they are represented on a common scale. This question was examined across three different studies utilizing a variety of methods (traditional event-related potentials, multivariate pattern classification, and eye tracking) to obtain a more comprehensive picture of how decision-relevant information is represented A common theme among the three studies was that positive and negative types of information seems to be, at least initially, represented as categorically distinct (whether it be information about gains vs. losses, or value vs. effort). Additionally, integration of different types of information appears to take place during the later phases of the decision period, which may also be when distortions in the representation of value information (ex. loss aversion) may occur. Overall, this body of work advances our understanding of the underpinnings of value based decisions by providing additional insight about how decision-relevant information is represented in a dynamic and flexible manner.

The research contributes to the field of video analysis by proposing novel approaches to automatically generating human observer performance patterns that can be effectively used in advancing the modern video analytic and forensic algorithms. Eye tracker and eye movement analysis technology are employed in medical research, psychology, cognitive science and advertising. The data collected on human eye movement from the eye tracker can be analyzed using the machine and statistical learning approaches. Therefore, the study attempts to understand the visual attention pattern of people when observing a captured CCTV footage. It intends to prove whether the eye gaze of the observer which determines their behaviour is dependent on the given instructions or the knowledge they learn from the surveillance task. The research attempts to understand whether the attention of the observer on human objects is differently identified and tracked considering the different areas of the body of the tracked object. It attempts to know whether pattern analysis and machine learning can effectively replace the current conceptual and statistical approaches to the analysis of eye-tracking data captured within a CCTV surveillance task. A pilot study was employed that took around 30 minutes for each participant. It involved observing 13 different pre-recorded CCTV clips of public space. The participants are provided with a clear written description of the targets they should find in each video. The study included a total of 24 participants with varying levels of experience in analyzing CCTV video. A Tobii eye tracking system was employed to record the eye movements of the participants. The data captured by the eye tracking sensor is analyzed using statistical data analysis approaches like SPSS and machine learning algorithms using WEKA. The research concluded the existence of differences in behavioural patterns which could be used to classify participants of study is appropriate machine learning algorithms are employed. The research conducted on video analytics was perceived to be limited to few iii projects where the human object being observed was viewed as one object, and hence the detailed analysis of human observer attention pattern based on human body part articulation has not been investigated. All previous attempts in human observer visual attention pattern analysis on CCTV video analytics and forensics either used conceptual or statistical approaches. These methods were limited with regards to making predictions and the detection of hidden patterns. A novel approach to articulating human objects to be identified and tracked in a visual surveillance task led to constrained results, which demanded the use of advanced machine learning algorithms for classification of participants The research conducted within the context of this thesis resulted in several practical data collection and analysis challenges during formal CCTV operator based surveillance tasks. These made it difficult to obtain the appropriate cooperation from the expert operators of CCTV for data collection. Therefore, if expert operators were employed in the study rather than novice operator, a more discriminative and accurate classification would have been achieved. Machine learning approaches like ensemble learning and tree based algorithms can be applied in cases where a more detailed analysis of the human behaviour is needed. Traditional machine learning approaches are challenged by recent advances in the field of convolutional neural networks and deep learning. Therefore, future research can replace the traditional machine learning approaches employed in this study, with convolutional neural networks. The current research was limited to 13 different videos with different descriptions given to the participants for identifying and tracking different individuals. The research can be expanded to include any complicated demands with regards to changes in the analysis process.

Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-02T00:00:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_10810_Hamilton Rivera Flor20171019-95619.pdf: 4725252 bytes, checksum: 16042ed4abfc5b07268db9f41baa2a83 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-17 / Automated reading and analysis of human emotion has the potential to be a powerful tool to develop a wide variety of applications, such as human-computer interaction systems, but, at the same time, this is a very difficult issue because the human communication is very complex. Humans employ multiple sensory systems in emotion recognition. At the same way, an emotionally intelligent machine requires multiples sensors to be able to create an affective interaction with users. Thus, this Master thesis proposes the development of a multisensorial system for automatic emotion recognition. The multisensorial system is composed of three sensors, which allowed exploring different emotional aspects, as the eye tracking, using the IR-PCR technique, helped conducting studies about visual social attention; the Kinect, in conjunction with the FACS-AU system technique, allowed developing a tool for facial expression recognition; and the thermal camera, using the FT-RoI technique, was employed for detecting facial thermal variation. When performing the multisensorial integration of the system, it was possible to obtain a more complete and varied analysis of the emotional aspects, allowing evaluate focal attention, valence comprehension, valence expressions, facial expression, valence recognition and arousal recognition. Experiments were performed with sixteen healthy adult volunteers and 105 healthy children volunteers and the results were the developed system, which was able to detect eye gaze, recognize facial expression and estimate the valence and arousal for emotion recognition, This system also presents the potential to analyzed emotions of people by facial features using contactless sensors in semi-structured environments, such as clinics, laboratories, or classrooms. This system also presents the potential to become an embedded tool in robots to endow these machines with an emotional intelligence for a more natural interaction with humans. Keywords: emotion recognition, eye tracking, facial expression, facial thermal variation, integration multisensorial

As online fashion retailing has grown immensely over the last fifteen years, retailers’ website designs have had to evolve to meet customers’ increasing demands, needs and expectations in order to attract and retain them. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a greater understanding of how different ages of consumers respond to retailers’ holistic website designs through the use of eye tracking technology. Insights gained from this research will enable retailers to enhance their website design in accordance with their target market’s behaviour, habits and expectations. Eye tracking is a key tool for analysing and understanding human-computer interaction and can be used alongside qualitative in-depth interviews to provide a detailed understanding of users’ responses to the website design. This study uses the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) paradigm to investigate how the fashion retailer’s holistic website design influences users’ visual, cognitive and behavioural responses, which leads to their approach or avoidance behaviour. The study also examines whether the shopper’s motivation or age will have an influence on their responses to the website design. It is important to analyse the differences in behaviour between age groups because more mature consumers are now shopping online, and academic research on this topic is limited. A sample of 50 participants, spanning ages 20 to 70 and consisting of regular users of the website, participated in the study. The study was conducted on the fashion retailer’s live website and results were recorded in real time, making the findings more valid. The study found that users were very focused on looking for products when shopping online and that the product listings page is arguably the most important page on the website as users visit it the most and spend the most time on it. Furthermore, the study found that navigation and customisation design stimuli were the most important to users and that they did not to pay much attention to the lower sections of the web pages. The study also found that users’ responses to the website can change according to their motivation as users spent less time on the website if they were goal-directed shopping and had more focused viewing patterns than if they were browsing. Moreover, the study also found that different age groups had different responses to the website design, as older users took longer to navigate the website and had slower viewing times than younger users, and also looked at the thumbnail images that were further down the page a lot less. This research has filled a gap in the academic literature and provided a detailed understanding of eye fixations, and how they can be interpreted in website design studies. Future academic studies on retailers’ website design can assume that long fixation durations indicate positive attention. Also, the findings enable retailers to understand how the design stimuli affect different ages of users’ shopping experiences and, as a result, can design their website according to their target markets’ behaviour. Furthermore, this study highlights the areas that are not capturing users’ attention on the website, and that need to be improved by retailers. Overall, the findings suggest that retailers should focus on providing an easy, efficient and quick shopping experience for users when designing their website.

The main Target is to compare commercial device for eye tracking analysis with a device made by DIY (Do it yourself) in the chosen environment. The work includes basic analysis methods Eye tracking. It offers a list of devices suitable for comparison, or marginally list of alternatives. A significant part of the thesis deals with construction of DIY tracker. The comparison is made on the basis of experimental measurements of commercial device and DIY device. The result is that in the selected conditions we can DIY device used because it is comparable with the commercial product. One of the sub-chapters is devoted also to question of the application DIY. In the last part was used the DIY device to analyse on realistic object. Specifically outdoor - print ads of Zubr brewery with evaluation.

Even during fixation, the eye is rarely still, as miniature eye movements continue to occur within fixational periods of the eye. These miniature movements are referred to as fixational eye movements. Microsaccades are one of the three types of fixational eye movements that have been identified. Microsaccades have been attributed to different visual processes/phenomena such as fixation stability, perceptual fading, and multistable perception. Still, debates surrounding the functional role of microsaccades in vision ensued, as many of the findings from earlier microsaccade reports contradict one another and the polarity in the field caused by these debates led many to believe that microsaccades do not hold a necessary/specialized role in vision. To gain a deeper understanding of microsaccades and its relevance in vision, we sought out to assess the role of microsaccades in bistable motion perception in our behavioral/eye-tracking study. Observers participated in an eye-tracking experiment where they were asked to complete a motion discrimination task while viewing a bistable apparent motion stimuli. The collected eye-tracking data was then used to train a classification model to predict directions of illusory motion perceived by observers. We found that small changes in gaze position during fixation, occurring within or outside microsaccadic events, predicted the direction of motion pattern imposed by the motion stimuli. Our findings suggest that microsaccades and fixational eye movements are correlated with motion perception and that miniature eye movements occurring during fixation may have relevance in vision. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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Face perception and recognition abilities develop throughout childhood and differences in viewing own-race and other-race faces have been found in both children (Hu et al., 2014) and adults (Blais et al., 2008). In addition, implicit biases have been found in children as young as six (Baron & Banaji, 2006) and have been found to influence face recognition (Bernstein, Young, & Hugenberg, 2007). The current study aimed to understand how gaze behaviors, implicit biases, and other-race experience contribute to the other-race effect and their developmental effects. Caucasian children’s (5-10 years of age) and young adults’ scanning behaviors were recorded during an old/new recognition task using Asian and Caucasian faces. Participants also completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a race experience questionnaire. Results found an own-race bias in both children and adults. Only adult’s IAT scores were significantly different from zero, indicating an implicit bias. Participants had a greater number of eye to eye fixations for Caucasian faces, in comparison to Asian faces and eye to eye fixations were greater in adults during encoding phases. Additionally, increased nose looking times were observed with age. Central attention to the nose may be indicative of a more holistic viewing strategy implemented by adults and older children. Participants spent longer looking at the mouth of Asian faces during encoding and test for older children and adults, but younger children spent longer looking at own-race mouths during recognition. Correlations between scanning patterns and implicit biases, and experience difference scores were also observed. Both social and perceptual factors seem to influence looking behaviors for own- and other-race faces and are undergoing changes during childhood. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection