Conduire un véhicule dans le brouillard requiert d’intégrer de l’information visuelle bruitée avec des attentes sur la scène routière pour rechercher des indices visuels importants pour la navigation. Les tâches d’identification et de recherche visuelle peuvent être vues comme des processus de prise de décision où l’information est accumulée et où des attentes sur l’objet et son contexte sont intégrées. L’accumulation d’information est souvent modélisée comme un processus passif. Cette thèse vise à mettre en avant des mécanismes actifs, intégrant les attentes sur la cible (sur sa position, sur son identité) et de l’information sensorielle dégradée (e.g., brouillard). Nous avons employé le paradigme de mouse-tracking, permettant d’inférer des aspects dynamiques du processus de prise de décision via les mouvements de la souris d’ordinateur. L’Étude 1 évalue l’effet du contexte dans la catégorisation de cible et suggère un compromis entre rapidité et exactitude de l’accumulation d’évidence pouvant être vu comme influençant activement la décision. Mais elle n’évalue pas directement la collecte active d’évidence. Les Études 2 et 3 incluent la mesure de la détection et vérification de la cible via les mouvement des yeux lors de la recherche visuelle dans des scènes dégradée. Les attentes sur la localisation (Étude 2) et sur l’identité de la cible (Étude 3) sont manipulées. Ces études éclairent les contributions de la détection et de la vérification dans l’accumulation d’évidence pour la réponse cible absente et cible présente. Pour conclure, nous proposons une ébauche de modèle de prise de décision intégrant une dynamique entre accumulation d’évidence et système oculomoteur. / Driving a vehicle in the fog requires the integration of noisy visual information with expectations about the visual road scene, in order to search for visual clues important for navigating. The visual search and identification of relevant objects can be seen as decision-making processes where sensory information is accumulated and where the expectations about the target object and its context are integrated. The accumulation of information is often modelled as a passive process. This thesis focuses on the contribution of active mechanisms integrating expectations about the target (its identity, its location) with degraded sensory information (with fog or artificial noise). We used the mouse-tracking paradigm, allowing to infer dynamic aspects of the decision-making process through a computer mouse movements. Study 1 evaluates the effect of the context for categorizing a target and suggests a trade-off between the speed and accuracy of the evidence accumulation process which can be seen as actively influencing the decision. But this study cannot directly evaluate the active collection of evidence. In Studies 2 and 3, target detection and verification are directly measured through eye movements during visual search tasks in visually degraded scenes. We manipulated the expectations about the location (Study 2) and the target’s identity (Study 3). These studies emphasize the contributions of the detection and verification processes in the accumulation of evidence toward the target present and target absent responses. In conclusion, we propose the draft of a decision-making model which integrates the dynamics between the accumulation of evidence, and the oculomotor system.

The electro-oculogram (EOG) is the most widely used technique for recording eye movements in clinical settings. It is inexpensive, practical, and non-invasive. Use of EOG is usually restricted to horizontal recordings as vertical EOG contains eyelid artefact (Oster & Stern, 1980) and blinks. The ability to analyse two dimensional (2D) eye movements may provide additional diagnostic information on pathologies, and further insights into the nature of brain functioning. Simultaneous recording of both horizontal and vertical EOG also introduces other difficulties into calibration of the eye movements, such as different gains in the two signals, and misalignment of electrodes producing crosstalk. These transformations of the signals create problems in relating the two dimensional EOG to actual rotations of the eyes. The application of an artificial neural network (ANN) that could map 2D recordings into 2D eye positions would overcome this problem and improve the utility of EOG. To determine whether ANNs are capable of correctly calibrating the saccadic eye movement data from 2D EOG (i.e. performing the necessary inverse transformation), the ANNs were first tested on data generated from mathematical models of saccadic eye movements. Multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) with non-linear activation functions and trained with back propagation proved to be capable of calibrating simulated EOG data to a mean accuracy of 0.33° of visual angle (SE = 0.01). Linear perceptrons (LPs) were only nearly half as accurate. For five subjects performing a saccadic eye movement task in the upper right quadrant of the visual field, the mean accuracy provided by the MLPs was 1.07° of visual angle (SE = 0.01) for EOG data, and 0.95° of visual angle (SE = 0.03) for infrared limbus reflection (IRIS®) data. MLPs enabled calibration of 2D saccadic EOG to an accuracy not significantly different to that obtained with the infrared limbus tracking data.

繪本共讀對學前及低年級兒童而言，因可同時增加兒童閱讀的經驗以及閱讀能力，故十分受到重視。過去文獻亦指出成人與兒童進行繪本共讀，確實能促進兒童的讀寫萌發能力，惟成人運用何種策略的助益較大，尚未有結論。閱讀最重要的目的在理解，然過往繪本共讀研究的焦點主要集中於繪本共讀對聲韻覺識等解碼能力的效果，較少觸及繪本共讀對兒童理解能力的影響，更少討論推論理解等較高層次的理解歷程，是否會影響兒童在繪本共讀時的表現。 本研究旨在探究成人不同的共讀策略以及不同閱讀理解層次的內容，是否會對兒童繪本閱讀歷程產生影響？實驗一操弄提問式與評述式兩種共讀策略，並以眼動儀(Eye Tracker)觀察記錄大班與小一兒童在共讀繪本時的眼動表現。結果顯示提問式策略對大班兒童注視目標圖區的引導功能較評述式策略強，但評述式策略則較提問式策略更能引導兒童凝視目標字區。大班兒童在不同策略時的眼動與語音對應性，在不同區域的差異相反，顯示圖畫與文字兩種區域，在繪本閱讀的歷程中，可能扮演不同的角色、提供不同的訊息。 實驗二進一步將成人與兒童的互動內容分為文義與推論理解兩不同閱讀理解層次，討論不同的共讀策略及閱讀理解層次對小一兒童的繪本共讀是否有所影響。結果同樣發現提問式策略可引導兒童注視目標圖區，而評述式策略則有助兒童凝視目標字區。在不同閱讀理解層次的影響上，則發現推論理解層次時，評述組兒童注視目標圖區時間高於文義理解；而文義理解層次的內容，對引導提問與評述兩組兒童注視目標字區的幫助則高於推論理解層次。惟語音對應凝視時間的指標，反映出評述組兒童目標字區推論理解的對應凝視比例高於文義理解，與凝視時間比例之策略差異相反。 評述組兒童在推論理解層次的內容時，凝視目標圖區的時間比例顯著高於文義理解，在文字區域文義理解高於推論理解的差異亦達顯著，顯示不同層次的閱讀理解內涵，確實會影響兒童看圖看文的眼動表現，故推知圖畫與文字兩區域，其資訊本質並不相同。而推論理解在目標字區的語音對應凝視比例高於文義理解的結果，則代表推論理解較文義理解更能引導兒童在繪本共讀時的注意力，並有機會使兒童可整合圖畫與文字兩類資訊。 文獻指出單純聆聽成人唸誦繪本內容，不針對內容加以明確的引導與互動，並不會對兒童的讀寫萌發能力有顯著的幫助。本研究進一步發現成人運用提問與評述等不同策略，及不同閱讀理解層次的互動內容，可分別引導兒童注視繪本畫面上不同的區域，使兒童在閱讀歷程中獲取推論或文義理解所需之不同訊息。因此，進行繪本共讀的活動時，成人或教育工作者應選擇適合的互動策略、設計不同理解層次的互動內容，並依據不同的互動與教學目的交替使用，以使繪本共讀對兒童的閱讀理解歷程發揮最大的功效。 / Since benefits of shared book reading (SBR) to young children’s emergent literacy have been manifested, numerous studies have emphasized the advantage of SBR to children’s decoding ability (e.g. phonological awareness).Even though the most important purpose of reading is comprehension, research which focus on the effects of SBR to comprehension ability is still scarce, and especially so for studies which discuss the relationship between SBR and higher level comprehension ability (e.g. inferential comprehension). The influence of adult’s interactive strategies on children’s reading comprehension is also indistinct too. The present study investigated the effects of adults’ interactive strategies and comprehension levels of interactive content on children’s comprehension process during SBR, which was reflected by the eye movement data. Experiment 1 compared reading behaviors of preschool and first-grade children under question versus comment strategies. Experiment 2 explored the effects of comprehension level of adult’s interactive content and interactive strategies on first-graders. Results of experiment 1 and 2 revealed that the question strategy drew preschoolers’ attention to target picture area (critical for story comprehension), while the comment strategy guided it to word area. Moreover, children paid more attention to target picture area in the inferential condition than the literal one and the data on target word showed the opposite pattern. Results confirm that adults’ explicit references during SBR can attract children’s attention to different areas on shared book, and thus enhance respective aspects of the comprehension process. Therefore, using interactive strategies and interactive content with high comprehension level contribute more to children’s literacy and comprehension development than simply reading to them.

本研究主要的研究目的有二：其一，探討高社會焦慮者對不同情緒臉孔的注意力時間歷程；其二，探討自動化階段與控制式階段所進行的注意力訓練，對於降低注意力偏誤以及改善社會焦慮的效果。基於上述兩項研究目的，分為研究一與研究二進行。研究一中，共有60名參與者完成眼動作業，其中高、低社會焦慮組 (HSA組/ LSA組) 各30名。在眼動作業中，生氣、難過、快樂與中性四類情緒臉孔同時呈現於螢幕上，參與者被指示自由觀賞螢幕上的圖片，直到圖片消失。研究一的結果發現，HSA組對生氣臉的初始注視時間 (initial gaze duration; IGD) 明顯高於LSA組，且高於其它三類情緒臉孔，LSA組對四類情緒臉孔的IGD則沒有差異；其次，LSA組對快樂臉的整體凝視時間比例 (proportion of total viewing time; PTVT) 明顯高於HSA組。時間歷程分析的結果發現，HSA組在751-1000 ms 對生氣臉的凝視可能性高於LSA組，以及在7-8 s對難過臉的凝視可能性高於LSA組；LSA組在9-10 s對快樂臉的凝視可能性高於HSA組。研究一結果指向，高社會焦慮者對威脅刺激可能有注意力脫離困難，同時可能缺少對正向刺激的注意。研究二共有72名高社會焦慮者參與，本研究將注意力訓練的刺激呈現時間操弄為100 ms或500 ms兩種，每一種刺激呈現時間的注意力訓練可分為注意力改變組 (AMP組) 與注意力控制組 (ACC組) 兩種情境，因此共有AMP-100、ACC-100、AMP-500與ACC-500四種訓練情境。所有參與者被隨機分派至四種訓練情境中，並完成八次 (每週兩次，為期四週) 的注意力訓練作業。參與者在注意力訓練的前、後分別完成量表填寫、修改版Posner作業與眼動作業的評估，並且在注意力訓練結束至少一個月後，接受追蹤階段的評估。研究二的結果發現，100 ms的注意力訓練可以增進AMP-100組在修改版Posner作業上對所有無效嘗試次的反應時間；降低其在眼動作業上對生氣臉的IGD；同時改善AMP-100組參與者的負向評價恐懼、互動焦慮以及演講前的預期焦慮。500 ms的注意力訓練可以降低AMP-500組的參與者在修改版Posner作業上對社會威脅詞無效嘗試次的反應時間；減少其在眼動作業上對負向情緒臉孔的注意力維持時間，並增加對正向情緒臉孔的注意力維持時間；同時降低AMP-500組的負向評價恐懼與社會互動焦慮。研究二結果顯示，自動化階段與控制式階段所進行的注意力訓練，均可促進高社會焦慮者對威脅刺激的注意力脫離速度，並且改善社會焦慮。本研究於討論中，針對本研究結果在理論與臨床應用上的意涵進行探討，並提出本研究的限制與對未來研究的建議。 / The purpose of the present study was twofold. First, it aimed to investigate the attentional processing of emotional faces in social anxiety using the eye-tracking technique. Second, it tried to examine the effects of attentional training in reducing attentional bias and in decreasing social anxiety symptoms in high socially anxious individuals. In study 1, a total of 30 high socially anxious (HSA) and 30 low socially anxious (LSA) participants completed the eye-movement task. In the eye-movement task, participants were instructed to view the slides on the monitor naturally. Each slide contained 4 emotional faces (one angry, one sad, one happy and one neutral face). The results showed that the HSA participants had longer initial gaze duration (IGD) on angry faces than the LSA participants did. Further, the LSA participants had higher proportion of total viewing time (PTVT) on happy faces than the HSA participants did. Time-course of attention to emotional faces was also examined. The results showed that the HSA group had higher fixation probabilities to angry faces than the LSA group did in the 751-1000 ms time window. The HSA group exhibited higher fixation probability to sad faces than the LSA group did in the 7-8 s time window. Further, compared with the HSA group, the LSA group had higher fixation probability on happy faces in the 9-10 s time window. The results of study 1 indicate that individuals with high socially anxiety may have difficulty in disengagement form social threatening information and may demonstrate decreased attention to positive information. In study 2, seventy-two high socially anxious participants completed the experiments. In the attention training task, stimuli were presented at two durations: 100 ms and 500 ms. Participants were randomly assigned to four different attentional training conditions, including the AMP-100 (attention modification program; presentation duration = 100 ms), the ACC-100 (attention control condition; presentation duration = 100 ms), the AMP-500 and the ACC-500 group. All participants completed eight attentional training sessions delivered over four weeks (i.e., twice weekly sessions). Participants were also required to complete preassessments, postassessments and follow-up assessments. The results demonstrated that the 100 ms attention modification program facilitated attention disengagement in the Modified Version of Posner task and decreased attentional maintenance to angry faces in the eye-movement task for participants in the AMP-100 group. Furthermore, it reduced the fear of negative evaluation, interaction anxiety and anticipated anxiety for public-speaking situation in the AMP-100 group. The 500 ms attention modification program facilitated the disengagement from social threat words in the Modified Version of Posner task in participants of the AMP-500 group. It also decreased the attentional maintenance to negative faces and increased the attentional maintenance to happy faces in participants of the AMP-500 group. Further, it reduced the fear of negative evaluation and social interaction anxiety in the AMP-500 group. The results of study 2 suggest that attention modofication programs may decrease difficulty in disengagement from threat and reduce some aspects of social anxiety symptoms in individuals with high socially anxiety. Theoretical and clinical implications of these results were discussed.

Since the turn of the millennium, a large number of computational models of visual salience have been put forward. How best to evaluate a given model's ability to predict where human observers fixate in images of real-world scenes remains an open research question. Assessing the role of spatial biases is a challenging issue; this is particularly true when we consider the tendency for high-salience items to appear in the image center, combined with a tendency to look straight ahead (“central bias”). This problem is further exacerbated in the context of model comparisons, because some—but not all—models implicitly or explicitly incorporate a center preference to improve performance. To address this and other issues, we propose to combine a-priori parcellation of scenes with generalized linear mixed models (GLMM), building upon previous work. With this method, we can explicitly model the central bias of fixation by including a central-bias predictor in the GLMM. A second predictor captures how well the saliency model predicts human fixations, above and beyond the central bias. By-subject and by-item random effects account for individual differences and differences across scene items, respectively. Moreover, we can directly assess whether a given saliency model performs significantly better than others. In this article, we describe the data processing steps required by our analysis approach. In addition, we demonstrate the GLMM analyses by evaluating the performance of different saliency models on a new eye-tracking corpus. To facilitate the application of our method, we make the open-source Python toolbox “GridFix” available.

Attention is today a scarce resource, which is from physiological substance of the human brain to a certain extent limited. Abundance of information that affect the user who grasp the information, cause a mismatch between the information that is infinite and ever growing, and user attention, which is used during the processing of this information. From the perspective of Attention economy, there are principles that explain how attention works. This work aims to verify these principles of attention in the electronic environment by measuring eye movements of sample of tested participants during execution of proposed tasks on particular website. Using a technology called eye-tracking there are collected supportive data on user's allocated attention in context of executed tasks on the website. These data are analysed and compared with the principles of attention. The analysis of the tested sample of website users confirmed that attention principles really corresponds with the measured allocated attention and also revealed a clear relationship between the various measured amounts of attention and subsequent user behaviour, which was nearly identical at most of the observed users. These findings led to the recommendation to respect the principles of attention in the design of any e-environment platform, which should avoid to the main researched problem, the abundance of information and the lack of attention of users in online environment.

Title of the thesis: The influence of exercise on subjective perception of our own body in participants of the Feldenkrais method course Aims of the thesis: The aim of this thesis was to deepen the theoretical knowledge of the Feldenkrais method, the basic anatomy of the cervical spine and the construction of the eye. Furthermore, the aim was to clarify the connection of eye movements and cervical spine, and define cervicoocular reflex, vestibuloocular reflex and whiplash syndrome. Then apply this knowledge and explain how one lesson of the Feldenkrais method affects the subjective perception of our own body, and how it can affect the magnitude of the cervical spine ranges. Method: It is a quantitative, experimental research. In the first part of the research, the questionnaire of own design monitored the effect of one lesson of the Feldenkrais method on the subjective perception of our own body in a group of 56 people aged 24 to 79 years, the lesson took part during a three-day course. In the second part of the research, the effect of one Feldenkrais method focused on the movement of eyes and cervical spine was studied in a group of 20 people aged 19 to 27 years. Data to this section was obtained based on input and output measurements using a measuring tape and a goniometer. In addition, a...

Recently, two attentional modes have been associated with specifi c eye movement patterns during scene processing. Ambient mode, characterized by short fi xations and long saccades during early scene inspection, is associated with localization of objects. Focal mode, characterized by longer fi xations, is associated with more detailed object feature processing during later inspection phase. The aim of the present study was to investigate the development of these attentional modes. More specifi cally, we examined whether indications of ambient and focal attention modes are similar in infants and adults. Therefore, we measured eye movements in 3- to 12-months-old infants while exploring visual scenes. Our results show that both adults and 12-month-olds had shorter fi xation durations within the fi rst 1.5 s of scene viewing compared with later time phases (>2.5 s); indicating that there was a transition from ambient to focal processing during image inspection. In younger infants, fi xation durations between two viewing phases did not differ. Our results suggest that at the end of the fi rst year of life, infants have developed an adult-like scene viewing behavior. The evidence for the existence of distinct attentional processing mechanisms during early infancy furthermore underlines the importance of the concept of the two modes.

The objective of this thesis is to clarify the term efective reading and what belongs to this topic, also to explore how the meaning of this term changes in the field of the electronic documents. This work also examines the reader's options of working with text and his view in this matter. Eye movements are analysed in first chapter. The term efective reading and its related concepts are analysed in chapter two. Third chapter is dealing with efective screen reading and characteristics of electronic texts. The possibilities of user work with texts on e- book readers and software e-book readers are examined in fourth chapter. Fifth chapter assesses online e-book readers. Questionnaire survey concerning reading of electronic documents is evaluated in chapter six.

We can affirm to apprehend a system in its totality only when we know how it behaves under its natural operating conditions. However, in the face of the complexity of the world, science can only evolve by simplifications, which paradoxically hide a good deal of the very mechanisms we are interested in. On the other hand, scientific enterprise is very tightly related to the advances in technology and the latter inevitably influences the manner in which the scientific experiments are conducted. Due to this factor, experimental conditions which would have been impossible to bring into laboratory not more than 20 years ago, are today within our reach. This thesis investigates neuronal integrative processes by using a variety of theoretical and experimental techniques wherein the approximation of ecologically relevant conditions within the laboratory is the common denominator. The working hypothesis of this thesis is that neurons and neuronal systems, in the sensory and higher cortices, are specifically adapted, as a result of evolutionary processes, to the sensory signals most likely to be received under ecologically relevant conditions. In order to conduct the present study along this line, we first recorded movies with the help of two microcameras carried by cats exploring a natural environment. This resulted in a database of binocular natural movies that was used in our theoretical and experimental studies. In a theoretical study, we aimed to understand the principles of binocular disparity encoding in terms of spatio-temporal statistical properties of natural movies in conjunction with simple mathematical expressions governing the activity levels of simulated neurons. In an unsupervised learning scheme, we used the binocular movies as input to a neuronal network and obtained receptive fields that represent these movies optimally with respect to the temporal stability criterion. Many distinctive aspects of the binocular coding in complex cells, such as the phase and position encoding of disparity and the existence of unbalanced ocular contributions, were seen to emerge as the result of this optimization process. Therefore we conclude that the encoding of binocular disparity by complex cells can be understood in terms of an optimization process that regulates activities of neurons receiving ecologically relevant information. Next we aimed to physiologically characterize the responses of the visual cortex to ecologically relevant stimuli in its full complexity and compare these to the responses evoked by artificial, conventional laboratory stimuli. To achieve this, a state-of-the-art recording method, voltage-sensitive dye imaging was used. This method captures the spatio-temporal activity patterns within the millisecond range across large cortical portions spanning over many pinwheels and orientation columns. It is therefore very well suited to provide a faithful picture of the cortical state in its full complexity. Drifting bar stimuli evoked two major sets of components, one coding for the position and the other for the orientation of the grating. Responses to natural stimuli involved more complex dynamics, which were locked to the motion present in the natural movies. In response to drifting gratings, the cortical state was initially dominated by a strong excitatory wave. This initial spatially widespread hyper-excitatory state had a detrimental effect on feature selectivity. In contrast, natural movies only rarely induced such high activity levels and the onset of inhibition cut short a further increase in activation level. An increase of 30% of the movie contrast was estimated to be necessary in order to produce activity levels comparable to gratings. These results show that the operating regime within which the natural movies are processed differs remarkably. Moreover, it remains to be established to what extent the cortical state under artificial conditions represents a valid state to make inferences concerning operationally more relevant input. The primary visual cortex contains a dense web of neuronal connections linking distant neurons. However the flow of information within this local network is to a large extent unknown under natural stimulation conditions. To functionally characterize these long-range intra-areal interactions, we presented natural movies also locally through either one or two apertures and analyzed the effects of the distant visual stimulation on the local activity levels. The distant patch had a net facilitatory effect on the local activity levels. Furthermore, the degree of the facilitation was dependent on the congruency between the two simultaneously presented movie patches. Taken together, our results indicate that the ecologically relevant stimuli are processed within a distinct operating regime characterized by moderate levels of excitation and/or high levels of inhibition, where facilitatory cooperative interactions form the basis of integrative processes. To gather better insights into the motion locking phenomenon and test the generalizability of the local cooperative processes toward larger scale interactions, we resorted to the unequalized temporal resolution of EEG and conducted a multimodal study. Inspired from the temporal properties of our natural movies, we designed a dynamic multimodal stimulus that was either congruent or incongruent across visual and auditory modalities. In the visual areas, the dynamic stimulation unfolded neuronal oscillations with frequencies well above the frequency spectrum content of the stimuli and the strength of these oscillations was coupled to the stimuli's motion profile. Furthermore, the coupling was found to be stronger in the case where the auditory and visual streams were congruent. These results show that the motion locking, which was so far observed in cats, is a phenomenon that also exists in humans. Moreover, the presence of long-range multimodal interactions indicates that, in addition to local intra-areal mechanisms ensuring the integration of local information, the central nervous system embodies an architecture that enables also the integration of information on much larger scales spread across different modalities. Any characterization of integrative phenomena at the neuronal level needs to be supplemented by its effects at the behavioral level. We therefore tested whether we could find any evidence of integration of different sources of information at the behavioral level using natural stimuli. To this end, we presented to human subjects images of natural scenes and evaluated the effect of simultaneously played localized natural sounds on their eye movements. The behavior during multimodal conditions was well approximated by a linear combination of the behavior under unimodal conditions. This is a strong indication that both streams of information are integrated in a joint multimodal saliency map before the final motor command is produced. The results presented here validate the possibility and the utility of using natural stimuli in experimental settings. It is clear that the ecological relevance of the experimental conditions are crucial in order to elucidate complex neuronal mechanisms resulting from evolutionary processes. In the future, having better insights on the nervous system can only be possible when the complexity of our experiments will match to the complexity of the mechanisms we are interested in.