Research has shown that self-monitoring can be effective in different settings and with a range of students as well as problem behaviors. However, teachers who use self-monitoring techniques have difficulties in using an effective cueing system as well as generalizing the newly acquired skill into the general education classroom. This study extends the literature by utilizing a tactile cueing device to increase the percentage of intervals of on-task behavior as well as increasing the intervals of on-task behavior in an inclusive general education classroom setting.

Advances in simulation technology have brought about many improvements to the way we train tasks, as well as how we perform tasks in the operational field. Augmented reality (AR) is an example of how to enhance the user's experience in the real world with computer generated information and graphics. Visual search tasks are known to be capacity demanding and therefore may be improved by training in an AR environment. During the experimental task, participants searched for enemies (while cued from visual, auditory, tactile, combinations of two, or all three modality cues) and tried to shoot them while avoiding shooting the civilians (fratricide) for two 2-minute low-workload scenarios, and two 2-minute high-workload scenarios. The results showed significant benefits of attentional cuing on visual search task performance as revealed by benefits in reaction time and accuracy from the presence of the haptic cues and auditory cues when displayed alone and the combination of the visual and haptic cues together. Fratricide occurrence was shown to be amplified by the presence of the audio cues. The two levels of workload produced differences within individual's task performance for accuracy and reaction time. Accuracy and reaction time were significantly better with the medium cues than all the others and the control condition during low workload and marginally better during high workload. Cue specificity resulted in a non-linear function in terms of performance in the low workload condition. These results are in support of Posner's (1978) theory that, in general, cueing can benefit locating targets in the environment by aligning the attentional system with the visual input pathways. The cue modality does not have to match the target modality. This research is relevant to potential applications of AR technology. Furthermore, the results identify and describe perceptual and/or cognitive issues with the use of displaying computer generated augmented objects and information overlaid upon the real world. The results also serve as a basis for providing a variety of training and design recommendations to direct attention during military operations. Such recommendations include cueing the Soldier to the location of hazards, and mitigating the effects of stress and workload.

This dissertation presents two studies examining the interaction between workload history and driver mental workload. The first experiment focuses on testing for the presence of a hysteresis effect in the driving task. The second experiment examines the proposition that cueing impending periods of higher task demand can reduce the impact of any such potential hysteresis effects. Thirty-two licensed drivers served as participants and all served in both studies. Using the directions provided by a Heads-Up-Display navigation system, participants followed a pre-set route in the simulated environment. At specified points within the drive, the navigation system would purposefully fail which required drivers to relay a ten digit alphanumeric error code to a remote operator in order to reset the system. Results indicated that this increase in task demand from the navigation system's failure leads to a significant increase in perceived mental workload as compared to pre-failure periods. This increase in driver mental workload was not significantly reduced by the time the drive ended, indicating the presence of a hysteresis effect. In the second experiment, the navigation system provided a completely reliable visual warning before failure. Results indicate that cueing had neither an effect on perceived mental workload, nor any ameliorating effect on the hysteretic type effect seen in mental workload recovery. The conclusion of these findings being that the overall safety and efficiency of the surface transportation system would likely improve by designs which accommodate the periods immediately following a reduction in stress. Whether from leaving high demand areas such as work zones or in the period immediately after using a in-car information device such as a GPS or a cell phone, these post-high workload periods are associated with increased variability in driver inputs and levels of mental workload.

Full motion simulators are traditionally used in the flight industry to train pilots. They are used to add the sensation of acceleration in simulation to make it more "realistic". Clearly the motion envelop of the simulator is limited by physical constraints so the motion platform has to be stopped and returned to the center position after an acceleration cue, called washout. A key question is: which acceleration can a subject feel and which not, called the acceleration threshold. We are also interested in strength of accelerations for which a subject can detect the direction. Literature gives several results, but we found that some of these values seemed very low to us and the experiments were conducted on very specific groups of people like pilots, A.J.Benson and H.Vogel (1986), Schroeder (1999). Furthermore, we are simulating moving vehicles like a car or an air plane and are interested in the acceleration ranges in a noisy environment. Noisy, the noise is a result from the vibration of engines, rough roads and disturbances that are Gaussian. This thesis gives a literature review, implement the cueing procedure to make motion and vibration to do different experiment and analyze the results. / Thesis / Master of Computer Science (MCS)

Our ability to be active agents in the world depends on our cognitive system to collect complex multisensory information, i.e. information coming from different senses, and integrate it appropriately. One fundamental topic of interest in the study of cognition is to understand the consequences of deafness on the organization of brain functions, specifically when one sensory modality is either lost or the information coming from that sensory modality is limited. In my work I used the spatial cueing paradigm to study how visual attention and selection is affected by diverse grades of congenital or acquired deafness in different life stages. The goal of the first study was to validate an integrated approach of covert and overt orienting to study social and non-social cueing of attention in hearing adults. Specifically, I examined manual and oculomotor performance of hearing observers performing a peripheral discrimination task with uninformative social (gaze cue) and non-social cues (arrow cue). In Experiment 1 the discrimination task was easy and eye movements were not necessary, whereas in Experiment 2 they were instrumental in identifying the target. Validity effects on manual response time (RT) were similar for the two cues in Experiment 1 and in Experiment 2, though in the presence of eye movements, observers were overall slower to respond to the arrow cue compared to the gaze cue. Cue-direction had an effect on saccadic performance before the discrimination was presented and throughout the duration of the trial. Furthermore, I found evidence of a distinct impact of the type of cue on diverse oculomotor components. While saccade latencies were affected by whether the cue was social or not, saccade landing positions were not affected by cue-type. Critically, the manual validity effect was predicted by the landing position of the initial eye movement. This work suggests that the relationship between eye movements and attention is not straightforward. In hearing adults, in the presence of eye movements, saccade latency was related to the overall speed of manual response, while eye movements landing position was closely related to manual performance in response to the validity of the cues. In the second study, I used the above-mentioned approach to investigate the impact of early profound deafness on the oculomotor control and orienting of attention to social and non-social cues. Previous research on covert orienting to the periphery suggests that early deaf adults are less sensitive to uninformative gaze cues, though were equally or more affected by non-social arrow cues. The aim of this second study was to investigate whether spontaneous eye movement behavior helps explain the reduced contribution of this social cue in deaf adults. Twenty-five deaf and twenty-five age-matched hearing observers took part in the experiment. In both groups, the cueing effect on RT was comparable for the gaze- and arrow-cue, although deaf observers responded significantly slower than hearing controls. While deaf and hearing observers responded equally to the cue presented in isolation, deaf participants relied significantly more on eye movements than hearing controls once the discrimination target was presented. Saccade landing position in the deaf group was affected by validity but not by cue type while latency was not modulated by these factors. Saccade landing position was also strongly related to the magnitude of the validity effect on RT, such that the greater the difference in saccade landing position between invalid and valid trials, the greater the difference in manual RT between invalid and valid trials. This work suggests that the contribution of overt selection in central cueing of attention is more prominent in deaf adults and determines the manual performance. The increase in eye movements and overall slower responses in deaf observers may act as an adaptive strategy to balance the need for accuracy in a context where vision and visual attention are used to monitor the surrounding environment in the absence of auditory input. This tendency to emphasize accuracy of response at the cost of responding more slowly seems to allow them to maintain the same level of cue-driven performance as their hearing peers. In the third study I focused on partial hearing loss. Little is known on the consequences of pure presbycusis, which is usually associated with aging (Age-related Hearing Loss, ARHL). In this case, auditory information is still present, although linked to an amount of uncertainty regarding its usefulness. In this study I started to investigate the role of ARHL on cognition considering covert orienting of attention, selective attention and executive control. I compared older adults with and without mild to moderate presbycusis (26-60 dB) performing 1) a spatial cueing task with uninformative central cues (social vs. non-social cues), 2) a flanker task and 3) a neuropsychological assessment of attention. Notably, while hearing impaired individuals responded as equally fast as their normally hearing peers, they were characterized by reduced validity effects on spatial cueing of attention, though no additional group differences were found between the impact of social and non-social cues. Hearing impaired individuals also demonstrated diminished performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and on tasks requiring divided attention and flexibility. Conversely, overall response times and flanker interference effects were comparable across groups. This work indicates that while response speed and response inhibition appear to be preserved following mild to moderate presbycusis, orienting of attention, divided attention and the ability to flexibly allocate attention, are more deteriorated in older adults with ARHL. These findings suggest that presbycusis might exacerbate the detrimental influences of aging on visual attention. Taken together, the findings of my research project highlight the different role hearing loss may play at different life stages. On the one hand, congenital and early deafness seems to induce cognitive and behavioral compensations, which may encompass oculomotor behavior as well; these changes occur progressively during development and may reflect experience-dependent plasticity. On the other hand, late-life compensations in vision and visual attention in older adults with presbycusis may not take place or do not effectively reduce the negative impact of the auditory impairment. Rather, my data suggest that in this population a deficit in audition may consequently lead to a deficit in visual attention. Future lines of research can aim to better characterize other aspects of attention in the aging population with presbycusis, e.g. peripheral visual attention and the relationship between covert and overt attention. Finally, future research may also consider intervention through early diagnosis and treatment by means of hearing aids, which can be beneficial to cognitive functions and might delay or even prevent cognitive decline in this population, in which sensory compensation may not be sufficient.

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A long-held belief is that human attention can be deployed voluntarily according to observers’ goals (top-down) or shifted automatically to the most salience object in the environment (bottom-up). Recent studies suggest a third category of attentional control: selection history. By this view, an observer’s experience in performing a task that requires the control of attention could automatically affect subsequent attention deployment in the task. This thesis examined selection history mechanisms of attentional control in two visual search phenomena. The first phenomenon is known as the Contextual Cueing Effect (CCE), and refers to an increased search efficiency when a specific distractor configuration is repeatedly associated with a specific target location (Chun and Jiang, 1998). In one study, we found a CCE when one repeated configuration was associated with up to four different target locations, suggesting that the CCE may involve mechanisms other than attentional guidance by one-to-one context-target associations. In another study, we found that the CCE was not affected by concurrent working memory load, and that there was little correlation between the magnitude of the CCE and working memory task performance when measured separately in the same participants. These results suggest that working memory may not be involved in such contextual learning. The second phenomenon is known as the the Item-Specific Proportion Congruent (ISPC) Effect, and refers to item-specific learning that controls the extent to which salient distractors capture attention. Through manual response and eye movement measures, we demonstrate that the ISPC effect reflects the search process itself, rather than processes that precede or follow search. We propose does item-specific learning produces transient changes in the activation of goal-related processes that mediate attention capture. / Thesis / Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) / Where we attend in visual space can be affected involuntarily by memories of how we have attended to visual space in the past. In other words, automatically retrieved memories can control our visual attention independent of volition. This thesis examines two visual search phenomena that display this type of memory-based control over attention. The first phenomenon reveals that search performance improves with experience searching through the same set of visual distractors on multiple occasions. We demonstrate that this form of learning is remarkably flexible; it can occur for multiple targets associated with the same set of distractors. We also demonstrate that this form of learning probably involves long-term rather than short-term memory mechanisms. The second phenomenon reveals how memory-based processes can prevent attention from being captured by a salient distractor. Eye movement data reveal that this form of learning impacts search itself, rather the processes that precede or follow search.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether cueing strategies embedded in computer delivered text messages affected the recall and comprehension of students who differed in their field dependent-independent cognitive style orientations. Two hundred thirty-eight undergraduate students of Virginia Tech participated the study, and 219 sets of valid data were used for the statistical analyses. All participants were given the Group Embedded Figures Test to determine their level of field dependence-independence. They were then randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups that varied in their use of cueing strategy. The first treatment group featured computer delivered text messages with color-highlighted-keywords, the second group featured the same textual content with color-highlighted-key-phrases, and the third group was a control group that featured the same content and employed no cueing strategy. Participants were administered two tests following the treatments, one that assessed knowledge of terminology and another that assessed comprehension. A 3 x 3 Analysis of Variance was conducted to explore the main effects for field dependency and cueing strategy and any interaction effect between the two factors. The results showed that field independents outperformed field dependents in all tests. There were no significant differences for the three treatments; the cueing strategies employed in this study had no effect on participants' learning. A significant interaction was seen between field dependency and cueing strategy. However, the results of a one-way ANOVA are unexpected: the cueing strategies employed did not improve field dependents' performance on the assessments and actually hindered the performance of field independents. / Ph. D.

Good motion cueing in a flight simulator serves to enhance the overall simulation environment. However, poor motion cueing can greatly detract from the simulation and serve solely to distract the pilot. The latter was the case for Virginia Tech's three degree-of-freedom motion-base. The most common method of motion cueing is to use washout filters to produce the best motion cues within the physical limitations of the motion system. This algorithm is named the classical washout algorithm and its filters were studied first in this research, but initially yielded undesirable results. In efforts to greatly improve the acceleration response in the pitch axis, the concept of an acceleration feedback controller in conjunction with washout filters was investigated. In developing a mathematical model of the motion-base and its corresponding circuitry, corrections and modifications were made to the circuitry which served to improve the dynamic response of the motion-base and enhance motion sensations. Next, design and implementation of the acceleration feedback controller for the pitch axis was performed and tested using a pilot rating scale and time history responses. The parameters for the acceleration feedback algorithm and the classical washout algorithm were varied to find the most favorable algorithm and set of parameters. Results of this paper have demonstrated the successful implementation of acceleration feedback and that the motion system at Virginia Tech now serves to greatly enhance the simulation environment. / Master of Science

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