Gaze Zone Classification for Driving Studies Using YOLOv8 Image Classification.

Gaze zone detection involves estimating where drivers look in terms of broad categories (e.g., left mirror, speedometer, rear mirror).

The use of machine learning to understand the role of visual attention in multi-attribute choice.

Whether eye movements (as a measure of visual attention) contribute to the understanding of how multi-attribute decisions are made, is still a matter of debate. In this study, we show how machine learning methods can be used to separate the effects of the information presented, eye movement patterns, and attention to specific information. We also show how to deal with data from a relatively small sample of participants, often found in eye tracking studies that require in-lab testing.

The construct validity of attitudes toward sex offenders (ATS) scale: ATS is more strongly linked to the acceptance of sex offenders than other offenders or non-offenders.

Negative attitudes toward offenders may hinder the rehabilitation process. The present study examines the relationship between attitudes toward sex offenders and stated acceptance of offenders and non-offenders into various aspects of daily life. Sixty female members of the public (18-50 years old, UK residents, recruited by word of mouth and via social media) completed an attitudes towards sex offenders (ATS) scale and indicated for each of eight vignettes describing ex-offenders and non-offenders whether they would accept them in various situations (housing, employment, day-to-day activities).

Automatic object detection for behavioural research using YOLOv8.

Observational studies of human behaviour often require the annotation of objects in video recordings. Automatic object detection has been facilitated strongly by the development of YOLO ('you only look once') and particularly by YOLOv8 from Ultralytics, which is easy to use. The present study examines the conditions required for accurate object detection with YOLOv8.

The Influence of Competing Social and Symbolic Cues on Observers' Gaze Behaviour.

The effects of social (eye gaze, pointing gestures) and symbolic (arrows) cues on observers' attention are often studied by presenting such cues in isolation and at fixation. Here, we extend this work by embedding cues in natural scenes. Participants were presented with a single cue (Experiment 1) or a combination of cues (Experiment 2) embedded in natural scenes and were asked to 'simply look at the images' while their eye movements were recorded to assess the effects of the cues on (overt) attention.

Thinking on your feet: Anticipatory foot placements in repeated bimanual object displacements.

Effective handling of objects requires proper use of the hands. If the object handling is done while standing or walking, it also requires proper use of the feet. We asked how people position their feet to meet future and ongoing object-handling demands.

Gaze-speech coordination during social interaction in Parkinson's disease.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) can affect social interaction and communication as well as motor and cognitive processes. Speech is affected in PD, as is the control of voluntary eye movements which are thought to play an important role in 'turn taking' in conversation.

Aims: This study aimed to measure eye movements during spoken conversation in PD to assess whether differences in patterns of eye gaze are linked to disrupted turn taking and impaired communication efficiency.

Visual attention in change blindness for objects and shadows.

Studies have found that observers pay less attention to cast shadows in images than to better illuminated regions. In line with such observations, a recent study has suggested stronger change blindness for shadows than for objects (Ehinger et al., 2016).

Data-driven group comparisons of eye fixations to dynamic stimuli.

Recent advances in software and hardware have allowed eye tracking to move away from static images to more ecologically relevant video streams. The analysis of eye tracking data for such dynamic stimuli, however, is not without challenges. The frame-by-frame coding of regions of interest (ROIs) is labour-intensive and computer vision techniques to automatically code such ROIs are not yet mainstream, restricting the use of such stimuli.

The effect of directional social cues on saccadic eye movements in Parkinson's disease.

There is growing interest in how social processes and behaviour might be affected in Parkinson's disease. A task which has been widely used to assess how people orient attention in response to social cues is the spatial cueing task. Socially relevant directional cues, such as a picture of someone gazing or pointing to the left or the right have been shown to cause orienting of visual attention in the cued direction.

Face and word composite effects are similarly affected by priming of local and global processing.

Holistic processing has been shown with both faces and words, but it is unclear how similar their underlying mechanisms are. In this study attention to global and local features was manipulated and the consequences for holistic word and face processing were examined. On each trial participants were presented two Navon figures and told to focus on either the global or the local level.

Does agreement mean accuracy? Evaluating glance annotation in naturalistic driving data.

Naturalistic driving studies often make use of cameras to monitor driver behavior. To analyze the resulting video images, human annotation is often adopted. These annotations then serve as the 'gold standard' to train and evaluate automated computer vision algorithms, even though it is uncertain how accurate human annotation is.

Eye Movements in Neuropsychological Tasks.

This chapter reviews how recording and analysis of eye movements have been applied to understanding cognitive functioning in patients with neurological disease. Measures derived from the performance of instructed eye movement tests such as the anti-saccade and memory-guided saccade tasks have been shown to be associated with cognitive test performance and the early stages of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Other researchers have taken an ecological approach and recorded the uninstructed pattern of saccades made by patients during performance of established neuropsychological tasks.

Eye Movements in the "Morris Maze" Spatial Working Memory Task Reveal Deficits in Strategic Planning.

Analysis of eye movements can provide insights into processes underlying performance of cognitive tasks. We recorded eye movements in healthy participants and people with idiopathic Parkinson disease during a token foraging task based on the spatial working memory component of the widely used Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery. Participants selected boxes (using a mouse click) to reveal hidden tokens.

Eye movements while judging faces for trustworthiness and dominance.

Past studies examining how people judge faces for trustworthiness and dominance have suggested that they use particular facial features (e.g. mouth features for trustworthiness, eyebrow and cheek features for dominance ratings) to complete the task.

Does it look safe? An eye tracking study into the visual aspects of fear of crime.

Studies of fear of crime often focus on demographic and social factors, but these can be difficult to change. Studies of visual aspects have suggested that features reflecting incivilities, such as litter, graffiti, and vandalism increase fear of crime, but methods often rely on participants actively mentioning such aspects, and more subtle, less conscious aspects may be overlooked. To address these concerns, this study examined people's eye movements while they judged scenes for safety.

Mind Your Step: the Effects of Mobile Phone Use on Gaze Behavior in Stair Climbing.

Stair walking is a hazardous activity and a common cause of fatal and non-fatal falls. Previous studies have assessed the role of eye movements in stair walking by asking people to repeatedly go up and down stairs in quiet and controlled conditions, while the role of peripheral vision was examined by giving participants specific fixation instructions or working memory tasks. We here extend this research to stair walking in a natural environment with other people present on the stairs and a now common secondary task: using one's mobile phone.

The eyes have it: Using eye tracking to inform information processing strategies in multi-attributes choices.

Although choice experiments (CEs) are widely applied in economics to study choice behaviour, understanding of how individuals process attribute information remains limited. We show how eye-tracking methods can provide insight into how decisions are made. Participants completed a CE, while their eye movements were recorded.

When do arrows start to compete? A developmental mouse-tracking study.

Recent work in adults has suggested that the strength of social and symbolic cues not presented at fixation (but allowing eye movements to the cue) may be determined less by their biological relevance and more by the distinctiveness of the shape of the cue. The present study examines whether these results extend to children, who may differ in their relative exposure to symbolic cues (arrows) compared to social cues. Children aged 3 to 11 were presented with congruent or incongruent pairs of cues (line drawings of gazing eyes, pointing hands, and arrows) and were asked to indicate the direction of the target cue (indicated at the start of the block) by moving the mouse towards the response box indicating its direction.

Age-congruency and contact effects in body expression recognition from point-light displays (PLD).

Recognition of older people's body expressions is a crucial social skill. We here investigate how age, not just of the observer, but also of the observed individual, affects this skill. Age may influence the ability to recognize other people's body expressions by changes in one's own ability to perform certain action over the life-span (i.

Eye Movements in Risky Choice.

We asked participants to make simple risky choices while we recorded their eye movements. We built a complete statistical model of the eye movements and found very little systematic variation in eye movements over the time course of a choice or across the different choices. The only exceptions were finding more (of the same) eye movements when choice options were similar, and an emerging gaze bias in which people looked more at the gamble they ultimately chose.

The developmental trajectory of attentional orienting to socio-biological cues.

It has been proposed that the orienting of attention in the same direction as another's point of gaze relies on innate brain mechanisms which are present from birth, but direct evidence relating to the influence of eye gaze cues on attentional orienting in young children is limited. In two experiments, 137 children aged 3-10 years old performed an adapted pro-saccade task with centrally presented uninformative eye gaze, finger pointing and arrow pre-cues which were either congruent or incongruent with the direction of target presentations. When the central cue overlapped with presentation of the peripheral target (Experiment 1), children up to 5 years old had difficulty disengaging fixation from central fixation in order to saccade to the target.

Responding to social and symbolic extrafoveal cues: cue shape trumps biological relevance.

Social cues presented at visual fixation have been shown to strongly influence an observer's attention and response selection. Here we ask whether the same holds for cues (initially) presented away from fixation, as cues are commonly perceived in natural vision. In six experiments, we show that extrafoveally presented cues with a distinct outline, such as pointing hands, rotated heads, and arrow cues result in strong cueing of responses (either to the cue itself, or a cued object).

The influence of social and symbolic cues on observers' gaze behaviour.

Research has shown that social and symbolic cues presented in isolation and at fixation have strong effects on observers, but it is unclear how cues compare when they are presented away from fixation and embedded in natural scenes. We here compare the effects of two types of social cue (gaze and pointing gestures) and one type of symbolic cue (arrow signs) on eye movements of observers under two viewing conditions (free viewing vs. a memory task).