Multiple elements of the retail environment can have an impact on a consumer's behaviour and purchase decisions. Much of the influence that the environment has on behaviour often goes unnoticed, as it affects internal processes that happen below the level of conscious awareness. This research aims to explore and quantify the effect a retail environment has on consumers' affective (emotional) and cognitive responses towards products. Priming is the influence of external stimuli on one's behaviour or response towards target stimuli. This research designed an experiment to prime participants with a particular coloured stimulus (pink, blue, or red) in order to measure the influence of this prime on the participants' purchase decisions. The participants entered a real-world simulated retail shop, and within a guided format they shopped through the available dresses, eventually picking out their three ranked favourites. The participants' physiological responses were measured using an eye-tracker and a portable Electroencephalogram (EEG) recording unit. The eye-tracking data were analysed using the Gaze Cascade Theory, testing for an increase in gaze bias towards preferred and primed products. The EEG data provided information about the participants' brain activity, and were analysed in accordance with Davidson's model of emotion, indicating an approach or withdrawal tendency towards different products. The results showed that with both eye-tracking and EEG it is possible to measure a difference between the participants' cognitive and affective responses towards the products that they preferred and chose as their favourites, compared with the products they did not choose. The EEG data provided evidence of a difference in neural responses between the prime matching coloured products and the non-prime matching products. However, the eye-tracking responses did not demonstrate a significant difference in eye-movements between the primed and not primed products. Technical innovation was required to allow the recording of EEG data in the semi-controlled shop environment, to allow data free of motion artefacts to be analysed. These results demonstrate the ability to measure consumers' physiological, neural, and subconscious responses in a real-world retail environment, whilst allowing the participants to move freely and unhindered. A novel methodology for analysing motion artefact free EEG data is presented. The results demonstrate a significant difference in emotional responses, as detected by EEG, in preference towards the prime coloured products, suggesting that priming has an influence in decision making in fashion retail environments.

archives@tulane.edu / Despite the increasing use of keyboards in the classroom, handwriting is still considered a fundamental skill that young children need to master to succeed in most areas of the elementary school curriculum. Children’s school readiness is determined by an array of cognitive, perceptual, and motor abilities that provide the foundation for academic success. These foundational abilities must be integrated for efficient handwriting and a failure of this integration predicts later academic achievement. When children begin writing, they develop from producing incoherent lines to producing letters that are more common in their language or are found in their names. Children must then learn to produce the remaining letters in their alphabet to become proficient writers. The process that children use to master the letters of an alphabet is not well understood. Previous research has focused primarily on the production of handwriting as a single skill, yet the production of handwriting entails a process in which children must integrate visual, fine motor, and basic reading skills to produce letters and words. The process of handwriting also develops in an environment that is full of letters and words. To date, the literature on handwriting has failed to address the processes that children utilize during handwriting, how these processes change through children’s development, and how the environment children are developing in influences these processes. This dissertation provides a theoretically integrative account of children’s handwriting development. The objectives of this dissertation are to determine the letter frequencies in children’s picture books, determine the opportunities that children are presented to copy letters in handwriting workbooks, measure the influence of change in grade and growth of basic reading skills on children’s visual processing development during handwriting, and measure visual-motor integration during handwriting. The approach to test these objectives is to integrate methods from educational and developmental psychology literatures in a novel series of studies using content analyses of children’s educational resources, head-mounted eye-tracking and academic assessments. By understanding the interaction between cognitive, linguistic, visual, and motor processes, researchers may establish possible mechanisms for the process of children’s development of complex skills, such as handwriting. / 1 / Nicholas E. Fears

Handwriting is a fundamental skill that must be acquired early in education for academic success. For example, printing errors made by kindergarten children have been found to predict reading and language achievement in first grade(Simner, 1982). The dynamic interplay of perceptual, motor, and linguistic skills makes handwriting a complex skill that can be challenging for young children to master. In this study, the eye movements of 40 children between the ages of 4 and 8 years of age were analyzed to determine how efficiency in visual-motor coordination develops as they copy letters and words, methods that teachers commonly employ to teach handwriting. These data provide new information about the development of the processes involved in the complex skill of handwriting during the first years of formal education. In the early school years, children become increasingly efficient in how they deploy eye movements as they learn to copy letters. The new methods used here provide a more fine-grained assessment tool to measure visual perception during handwriting and offer a more systematic approach for identifying potential sources of errors made by young children as they learn to write. / Nicholas E Fears

The primary goal of this research is to use eye-tracking in the development and usability evaluation of an e-learning tool called "Problem Solving Environment for Continuous Process Design" (PSE). The PSE is meant to aid engineering students in learning the design processes of automated manufacturing systems. PSE is a user-interactive Flash application which gives the user an opportunity to virtually design an automated industrial process by manipulating the parameters associated with it. PSE is evaluated using eye-tracking experiments in which users' eye movements are tracked using camera and sensors to determine users' gaze direction and fixations. The data collected from the experiment is used to determine if use of visual cues improved the usability of the PSE. Results show that use of visual cues for gaze direction improved the usability of the PSE application, based on faster task completion times and improved navigability.

The present study examined whether infants aged 3 to 9 months displayed an adult-like left visual field bias when processing dynamic faces. In Experiment 1 infants aged 6 to 9 months viewed videos of dynamic face stimuli. Eye tracking data revealed that these infants showed a left visual field bias by attending significantly more to the right side of the faces. In Experiment 2 a younger group of infants, aged 3 to 6 months, failed to demonstrate a group left visual field bias. Instead, some infants displayed a consistent left visual field bias whereas others displayed a consistent right visual field bias. To our knowledge, these findings provide the first eye-tracking evidence to suggest the existence of a left visual field bias in infancy.

The present study examined whether infants aged 3 to 9 months displayed an adult-like left visual field bias when processing dynamic faces. In Experiment 1 infants aged 6 to 9 months viewed videos of dynamic face stimuli. Eye tracking data revealed that these infants showed a left visual field bias by attending significantly more to the right side of the faces. In Experiment 2 a younger group of infants, aged 3 to 6 months, failed to demonstrate a group left visual field bias. Instead, some infants displayed a consistent left visual field bias whereas others displayed a consistent right visual field bias. To our knowledge, these findings provide the first eye-tracking evidence to suggest the existence of a left visual field bias in infancy.

The present study used eye-tracking to investigate whether a model’s gaze direction influences the way observers look at the entire body of the model and how this interacts with the observer and the model’s gender. Participants viewed individual male and female computer agents during both a free-viewing task and a rating task to evaluate the attractiveness of each character. The results indicated that both male and female participants primarily gazed at the models’ faces. Participants also spent more time scanning the face when rating the attractiveness of each model. Observers tended to scan faces with a direct gaze longer than faces with an averted gaze for both the free-viewing and attractiveness rating tasks. Lastly, participants evaluated models with a direct gaze as more attractive than models with an averted gaze. As these results occurred for pictures of computer agents, and not actual people, this suggests that direct gaze, and faces in general, are powerful for engaging attention. In summary, both task requirements and gaze direction modified face viewing preference.

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.

The research involves the creation of an interactive installation showcasing the dynamic nature of human visual observation of a still photograph. Using an eye tracker as an input device, the data collected is used to create a photographic collage in stereoscopic 3D. The installation is artistically inspired by selected photographic works of artists David Hockney, Maurizio Galimberti, Joyce Neimanas and Cubist painters especially Picasso. One of the key factors in their work that is adapted in this research, is the representation of the way eyes search points of interest demonstrated in what they painted/photographed. The installation will demonstrate an expressive representation of the viewers' experience of looking at a photograph. This will be achieved by applying certain manipulations of the photograph based on the input obtained from the viewer using an eye tracker. The eye tracker collects information about the location and number of instances of where the viewer is when observing a photograph. This is fed into software that processes the data and determines the location and the size of the area of the photograph and amount of the manipulation to be applied to that area. These two constitute the artistic rules that are used to create the end product the photo collage. The individual pieces of the collage will be arranged in a virtual 3D model by the artist and will be projected in stereoscopic 3D. The development of this installation progressed through multiple case studies and optimization based on ease of use, cost and availability of resources. This process is intended to be a framework for artists working in interactive visual media.

It has been shown in experiments that a method of teaching where students are encouraged to create their own solution methods to mathematical problems (creative mathematically founded reasoning, CMR) results in better learning and proficiency than one where students are provided with solution methods for them to practice by repetition (algorithmic reasoning, AR). The present study investigated whether students in an AR practice condition pay less attention to information relevant for mathematical problem solving than students in a CMR condition. To test this, attentional behavior during practice was measured using eye-tracking equipment. These measurements were then associated with task proficiency in a follow-up test one week after the practice session. The findings support the theory and confirm previous studies in that CMR leads to better task performance in the follow-up test. The findings also suggest that students within the CMR condition whom focus less on extraneous information perform better. / Experiment har visat att en undervisningsmetod i vilken elever uppmuntras att själva komma på lösningsmetoder till matematiska problem (creative mathematically founded reasoning, CMR) resulterar i bättre inlärning och färdighet än en metod i vilken eleverna ges en färdig en lösningsmetod att öva på genom repetition (algorithmic reasoning, AR). Denna studie undersöker om elever under en AR-träningsbetingelse ägnar mindre uppmärksamhet åt information som är relevant för matematisk problemlösning än vad elever under en CMR-träningsbetingelse gör. För att testa detta mättes elevernas uppmärksamhetsbeteende under träning med hjälp av ögonrörelsekamera. Måtten ställdes sedan i relation till uppgiftsfärdighet i ett uppföljningstest en vecka efter träningssessionen. Resultaten stödjer teorin och bekräftar tidigare studier som visat att CMR leder till bättre prestation i uppföljningstestet. Resultaten tyder även på att de elever under CMR-betingelsen som fokuserar minst på ovidkommande information presterar bättre.