INTRODUCTION:Metacognitive accuracy involves incorporating rapid in-the-moment self-assessments to discern if one's own judgments are correct/incorrect. Previous literature has alluded to relationships between metacognitive functioning and other higher domains of cognition, such as executive function. This study aimed to build on prior research by investigating the role basic cognitive domains may play in facilitating metamemory monitoring. It was hypothesized that higher levels of executive function, working memory, processing speed, and attention would predict greater performance on measures of metacognitive accuracy. METHOD:Participants (N = 105) completed a computerized paradigm involving a multi-trial word list learning task, with different words representing variable point-values. Participants later completed a recognition task. After each item, they reported retrospective confidence judgments. From these, a measure of metacognitive accuracy (meta d') was derived. Participants completed additional cognitive measures of executive function (Trails B), working memory (Backward Digit Span), processing speed (Symbol Digit Modalities Test), and attention (Trails A, Forward Digit Span). RESULTS:A large percentage of the variability (R2 = .386) in metacognitive accuracy was attributed to the predictors in the model, F(5, 99) = 3.457, p = .006. Backward Digit Span and Trails A predicted greater metacognitive accuracy, while Forward Digit Span showed an unexpected negative relationship. CONCLUSIONS:These findings indicate that greater working memory and visual attention capacity are predictive of greater metacognitive monitoring accuracy. This suggests that more basic, fundamental cognitive processes may facilitate metamemory monitoring in healthy adults.

Many people are afraid of spiders and consider them to be both dangerous and disgusting, which can negatively impact their mental well-being as well as their relationship with nature. Very few studies have examined what characteristics draw visual attention toward or away from spiders, or have assessed the impact of arachnophobia and sex on attentional biases. Here, 118 undergraduate students freely viewed single and paired images of spiders and other arthropods in their natural environments while having their eye movements monitored. Participants also completed a survey measuring spider phobia and attitudes toward spiders. Multiple eyetracking metrics (total dwell time, first run dwell time, first fixation time, and run count) were used as indicators of attentional bias. Findings suggest a general avoidance of spider images in the presence of other non-spider arthropod images as well as avoidance of scorpion images in the presence of non-scorpion arachnid images. Presentation of image pairs with two kinds of spiders elicit attention toward spider-specific features. These effects were occasionally, though not often, moderated by sex and phobia levels. Across all metrics, there was a tendency to record longer first fixation times, shorter dwell times, and lesser run counts toward images of spiders. Images of jumping spiders and insects received considerably more and faster attentional allocation relative to other spiders. Understanding how general body form versus specific spider features influence visual attention provides insight into visual factors that may motivate spider phobia, providing evidence-based knowledge that could be useful in treatments. Additionally, knowledge of potentially appealing features of spiders may provide useful perspectives for communicating the usefulness of spiders in our ecosystem.

Studies have shown that people can derive summary statistics – such as the mean – from sets of similar objects for low-level (orientation, color value), mid-level (size), and high-level visual features (emotional expression) through the phenomena of ensemble perception. Recent research has identified a bias to overestimate variability in both static and dynamic arrays of lines at various orientations – referred to as the variability overestimation effect. Here, we explored whether the variability overestimation effect generalizes to other visual features, namely color value, and size and whether it generalizes to different response types. Such generalization would be consistent with the idea that this overestimation is inherent in ensemble perception processes. In the current experiments, participants saw a set of nine circles that varied in either size or color value and estimated the variability of the set. Overall, participants overestimated variability in color value and size. This overestimation was more pronounced when the set had lesser variability. The fact that the visual system overestimates variability across different features raises the possibility that this bias is encompassed within ensemble perception. The exaggerated bias when variability is low for orientation, size, and color value is consistent with a common mechanism underlying these biases. Understanding the perception of variability in ensembles has theoretical implications for ensemble perception processes and has applied implications such as how to design visualizations that require making judgments about critical but uncertain information such as the possible trajectory of the path of a hurricane.

Previous research examining dynamic visual search showed that pop-out effects can be observed for color targets, though it is unclear whether these effects are attributable to the same pre-attentive mechanisms driving pop-out in static displays (Fu et al., Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 3329-3339, 2020). Other research examining multiple-object tracking (MOT) demonstrated that people can track three to five objects simultaneously, with some uncertainty about the flexibility of attentional allocation during tracking (Meyerhoff et al., Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 79, 1255-1274, 2017). In three experiments, the present study combined a dynamic pop-out display with the MOT task. Participants saw moving objects with colors changing continuously and responded when a uniquely shaded target popped out among identical items. Experiment 1 examined the mechanisms driving dynamic visual search efficiency and dual task interference on both tracking and searching performance. Experiment 2 explored the effect of processing orientations (i.e., global/local). Experiment 3 incorporated an abrupt color change to examine performance. Results showed that search for a unique target in dynamic contexts required attention, with an interference effect observed for both searching and tracking in the dual task. Making the color change more abrupt improved performance but remained less efficient than static pop-out. Moreover, there is some evidence suggesting that adopting a global processing orientation may be more advantageous for task performance than a local processing orientation. Taken together, the current findings suggest that search for a unique target in dynamic contexts requires focal attention and that tracking and searching appear to involve similar processing mechanism that likely compete to draw from a shared pool of resources.

Change blindness, a failure to detect changes in visual scenes, can impact workers' ability to detect hazards and compromise safety on the jobsite. Examining the relationship between this phenomenon and individual characteristics (e.g., personality variables, safety training) may conceivably support safety managers in predicting susceptibility to change blindness. However, little is known regarding variables influencing change blindness in construction safety. To address this knowledge gap, this study examined the association between individual factors such as age, work experience, sex, formal safety training, personality, mindfulness, and injury exposure with change blindness in construction safety settings. To this end, a change detection experiment was conducted to measure participants' response time and accuracy rate. Hierarchical agglomerative clustering was used to group the continuous dependent variables into analytical categories. Logistic regression was then used to analyze the association of individual factors with both response time and accuracy rate. The results revealed that age and the personality traits of agreeableness (+) and conscientiousness (-) were associated with response time, while mindfulness (+) and injury exposure (+) were associated with the accuracy rate. The findings of this study advance our understanding of variables that impact change blindness. The association of individual factors with change detection performance in construction provides a foundation for subsequent research to understand hazard identification in dynamic environments better. Regarding practice, these individual factors can be used as precursors to predict the susceptibility of workers to change blindness in construction; foreseeably, industry professionals can also utilize the predictive power of these variables to plan preventive actions on the jobsite.

OBJECTIVE:Metacognition and quality of life (QoL) are both adversely affected by traumatic brain injury (TBI), but the relation between them is not fully understood. As such, the purpose of this study was to determine the degree to which metacognitive accuracy predicts QoL in individuals with TBI.METHODS:Eighteen participants with moderate-to-severe TBI completed a stimulus-response task requiring the discrimination of emotions depicted in pictures of faces and then provided a retrospective confidence judgment after each response. Metacognitive accuracy was calculated using participants' response accuracy and confidence judgment accuracy. Participants also completed the Quality of Life After Brain Injury (QOLIBRI) questionnaire to assess QoL in various areas of functioning.RESULTS:Performance of a linear regression analysis revealed that higher metacognitive accuracy significantly predicted lower overall QoL. Additionally, higher metacognitive accuracy significantly predicted lower QoL related to cognition and physical limitations.CONCLUSION:The study results provide evidence of an inverse relation between metacognitive performance and QoL following TBI. Metacognitive changes associated with TBI and their relation to QoL have several clinical implications for TBI rehabilitation.

Background and Context: Understanding how a student programmer solves different task types in different programming languages is essential to understanding how we can further improve teaching tools to support students to be industry-ready when they graduate. It also provides insight into students’ thought processes in different task types and languages. Few (if any) studies investigate whether any differences exist between the reading and navigation behavior while completing different types of tasks in different programming languages. Objectives: We investigate whether the use of a certain programming language (C++ versus Python) and type of task (new feature versus bug fixing) has an impact on performance and eye movement behavior in students exposed to both languages and task types. Participants: Fourteen students were recruited from a Python course that taught Python as an introductory programming language. Study Method: An eye tracker was used to track how student programmers navigate and view source code in different programming languages for different types of tasks. The students worked in the Geany Integrated Development Environment (IDE, used also in their course) while eye-tracking data was collected behind the scenes making their working environment realistic compared to prior studies. Each task type had a Python and C++ version, albeit on different problems to avoid learning effects. Standard eye-tracking metrics of fixation count and fixation durations were calculated on various areas of the screen and on source code lines. Normalized versions of these metrics were used to compare across languages and tasks. Findings: We found that the participants had significantly longer average fixation duration and total fixation duration adjusted for source code length during bug fixing tasks than the feature addition tasks, indicating bug fixing is harder. Furthermore, participants looked at lines adjacent to the line containing the bug more often before looking at the buggy line itself. Participants who added a new feature correctly made their first edit earlier compared to those who failed to add the feature. Tasks in Python and C++ have similar overall fixation duration and counts when adjusted for character count. The participants spent more time fixating on the console output while doing Python tasks. Overall, task type has a bigger effect on the overall fixation duration and count compared to the programming language. Conclusions: CS educators can better support students in debugging their code if they know what they typically look at while bug fixing. For new feature tasks, training students not to fear edits to learn about the code could also be actively taught and encouraged in the classroom. CS education researchers can benefit by building better IDE plugins and tools based on eye movements that guide novices in recognizing bugs and aid in adding features. These results will lead to updating prior theories on mental models in program comprehension of how developers read and understand source code. They will eventually help in designing better programming languages and better methods of teaching programming based on evidence on how developers use them.

Cognitive control allows individuals to flexibly and efficiently perform tasks by attending to relevant stimuli while inhibiting distraction from irrelevant stimuli. The antisaccade task assesses cognitive control by requiring participants to inhibit a prepotent glance towards a peripheral stimulus and generate an eye movement to the mirror image location. This task can be administered with various contextual manipulations to investigate how factors such as trial timing or emotional content interact with cognitive control. In the current study, 26 healthy adults completed a mixed antisaccade and prosaccade fMRI task that included task irrelevant emotional faces and gap/overlap timing. The results showed typical antisaccade and gap behavioral effects with greater BOLD activation in frontal and parietal brain regions for antisaccade and overlap trials. Conversely, there were no differences in behavior based on the emotion of the task irrelevant face, but trials with neutral faces had greater activation in widespread visual regions than trials with angry faces, particularly for prosaccade and overlap trials. Together, these effects suggest that a high level of cognitive control and inhibition was required throughout the task, minimizing the impact of the face presentation on saccade behavior, but leading to increased attention to the neutral faces on overlap prosaccade trials when both the task cue (look towards) and emotion stimulus (neutral, non-threatening) facilitated disinhibition of visual processing.

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals exhibit a tendency to overestimate the variability of both low-level features (e.g., color, orientation) and mid-level features (e.g., size) when items are presented dynamically in a sequential order, a finding we will refer to as the variability overestimation effect. Because previous research on this bias used sequential displays, an open question is whether the effect is due to a memory-related bias or a vision-related bias. To assess whether the bias would also be apparent with static, simultaneous displays, and to examine whether the bias generalizes to spatial properties, we tested participants' perception of the variability of a cluster of dots. Results showed a consistent overestimation bias: Participants judged the dots as being more spread than they actually were. The variability overestimation effect was observed when there were 10 or 20 dots but not when there were 50 dots. Taken together, the results of the current study contribute to the ensemble perception literature by providing evidence that simultaneously presented stimuli are also susceptible to the variability overestimation effect. The use of static displays further demonstrates that this bias is present in both dynamic and static contexts, suggesting an inherent bias existent in the human visual system. A potential theoretical account-boundary effect-is discussed as a potential underlying mechanism. Moreover, the present study has implications for common visual tasks carried out in real-world scenarios, such as a radiologist making judgments about distribution of calcification in breast cancer diagnoses.

Purpose: Diagnosing breast cancer based on the distribution of calcifications is a visual task and thus prone to visual biases. We tested whether a recently discovered visual bias that has implications for breast cancer diagnosis would be present in expert radiologists, thereby validating the concern of this bias for accurate diagnoses. Approach: We ran a vision experiment with expert radiologists and untrained observers to test the presence of visual bias when judging the spread of dots that resembled calcifications and when judging the spread of line orientations. We calculated visual bias scores for both groups for both tasks. Results: Participants overestimated the spread of the dots and the spread of the line orientations. This bias, referred to as the variability overestimation effect, was of similar magnitudes in both expert radiologists and untrained observers. Even though the radiologists were better at both tasks, they were similarly biased compared with the untrained observers. Conclusions: The results justify the concern of the variability overestimation effect for accurate diagnoses based on breast calcifications. Specifically, the bias is likely to lead to an increased number of false-negative results, thereby leading to delayed treatments.

This study investigated the moderating effect of personality traits in the association between worker characteristics (work experience, training, and previous injury exposure) and hazard-identification performance through mechanisms of visual attentional indicators. Through an integrated moderated mediation model, the attentional distribution, search strategy, and hazard-identification performance of participants were examined across 115 fall hazards. Results indicate that individuals with more work experience and safety training were better at hazard identification independent of visual attention and regardless of personality. Furthermore, individual differences in conscientiousness and openness personality dimensions significantly moderated the associations between (1) worker characteristics and visual attention; and (2) visual attention and hazard identification. This study provides empirical evidence for the potentially pivotal role of worker characteristics and dispositional traits with regard to hazard-identification performance on jobsites. These findings can empower safety managers to identify at-risk workers and design personalized intervention strategies to improve the hazard-identification skills of workers. (C) 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.

In the present article, we examine a novel illusion of motion-the Z-Box illusion-in which the presence of a bounding object influences the perception of motion of an ambiguous stimulus that appears within. Specifically, the stimuli are a structure-from-motion (SFM) particle orb and a wireframe cube. The orb could be perceived as rotating clockwise or counterclockwise while the cube could only be perceived as moving in one direction. Both stimuli were presented on a two-dimensional (2D) display with inferred three-dimensional (3D) properties. In a single experiment, we examine motion perception of a particle orb, both in isolation and when it appears within a rotating cube. Participants indicated the orb's direction of motion and whether the direction changed at any point during the trial. Accuracy was the critical measure while motion direction, the number of particles in the orb and presence of the wireframe cube were all manipulated. The results suggest that participants could perceive the orb's true rotation in the absence of the cube so long as it was made up of at least ten particles. The presence of the cube dominated perception as participants consistently perceived congruent motion of the orb and cube, even when they moved in objectively different directions. These findings are considered as they relate to prior research on motion perception, computational modelling of motion perception, structure from motion and 3D object perception.

Previous attempts to classify task from eye movement data have relied on model architectures designed to emulate theoretically defined cognitive processes and/or data that have been processed into aggregate (e.g., fixations, saccades) or statistical (e.g., fixation density) features. Black box convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are capable of identifying relevant features in raw and minimally processed data and images, but difficulty interpreting these model architectures has contributed to challenges in generalizing lab-trained CNNs to applied contexts. In the current study, a CNN classifier was used to classify task from two eye movement datasets (Exploratory and Confirmatory) in which participants searched, memorized, or rated indoor and outdoor scene images. The Exploratory dataset was used to tune the hyperparameters of the model, and the resulting model architecture was retrained, validated, and tested on the Confirmatory dataset. The data were formatted into timelines (i.e., x-coordinate, y-coordinate, pupil size) and minimally processed images. To further understand the informational value of each component of the eye movement data, the timeline and image datasets were broken down into subsets with one or more components systematically removed. Classification of the timeline data consistently outperformed the image data. The Memorize condition was most often confused with Search and Rate. Pupil size was the least uniquely informative component when compared with the x- and y-coordinates. The general pattern of results for the Exploratory dataset was replicated in the Confirmatory dataset. Overall, the present study provides a practical and reliable black box solution to classifying task from eye movement data.

Due to the dynamic nature of construction sites, workers face constant changes, including changes that endanger their safety. Failing to notice significant changes to visual scenes-known as change blindness-can potentially put construction workers into harm's way. Hence, understanding the inability or failure to detect change is critical to improving worker safety. No study to date, however, has empirically examined change blindness in relation to construction safety. To address this critical knowledge gap, this study examined the effects of change types (safety-relevant or safety-irrelevant) and work experience on hazard-identification performance, with a focus on fall-related hazards. The experiment required participants (construction workers, students with experience, and students with no work experience) to detect changes between two construction scenario images that alternated repeatedly and then identify any changes. The results demonstrated that, generally, safety-relevant changes were detected significantly faster than safety-irrelevant changes, with certain types of fall hazards (e.g., unprotected edge hazards) being detected faster than other types (e.g., ladder hazards). The study also found that more experienced subjects (i.e., workers) achieved higher accuracy in detecting relevant changes, but their mean response time was significantly longer than that of students with and without experience. Collectively, these findings indicated that change blindness may influence changes in workers' situation awareness on jobsites. Demonstrating workers' susceptibility to change blindness can help raise awareness during worker trainings about how workers allocate and maintain attention. (C) 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.

One of the main contributors to the human errors that lead to catastrophic injuries in the construction workplace is the failure to identify hazards as a result of poor attention or cognitive lapses. To address this safety concern, the present study used eye-tracking technology to assess how the association between work experience and hazard identification may be mediated due to inattention. A mediation analysis was conducted and tested using a bias-corrected bootstrapping technique with 5,000 resamples. The results estimate the direct and indirect effects of work experience on the hazard identification skills of construction workers observing varying hazardous conditions. The results of the mediation analysis confirm that inattention-demonstrated via inattentiveness toward hazards-mediates the relationship between work experience and hazard identification. Specifically, though work experience and dwell time positively correlate with hazard identification, the direct effect of work experience on hazard identification is attenuated with the inclusion of the mediator variables in the model, thus suggesting attentional impairment offsets the benefits of work experience. The outcomes of this study will enable researchers and safety practitioners to harness real-time eye-movement patterns to identify the precursors of cognitive failure, deficient attentional allocation, and poor visual search strategies, all of which may put workers at risk on construction sites. The results also facilitate the design of training interventions that will address unique performance deficiencies in workers to prevent the human errors that cause injuries in dynamic environments.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that when performing a visual search task, items can pop out of a display such that they are identified rapidly, independent of the number of distractors present. It has been less clear whether this type of pop-out is limited to static displays (e.g., images) or whether it can also occur in scenes containing movement, more akin to how we experience the real world. Recently, Jardine and Moore (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 617–630, 2016) examined whether pop-out also occurs in displays consisting of dynamic motion – wherein items in the display rotated continuously until a critical frame that would elicit pop-out under static presentation conditions – and found that search was greatly impaired. It remains unclear, however, whether such impairment is exerted equivalently across all types of dynamic motions or if it is specific to orientation. In the present study, we replicate the original Jardine and Moore (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42, 617–630, 2016) finding and extend this examination to another dimension – color change. We also explore whether search efficiency can be improved with dynamic context if aspects of the display become predictable. The results suggest that not all types of dynamic change impair search performance. Specifically, oddball color targets continue to pop out even when the items in the display are dynamic. Interestingly, adding predictable context did not aid search accuracy as expected, rather resulting in poorer performance. Taken together, the findings suggest that the influence of dynamic context on search performance is not absolute.

Cognitive resources are needed for successful executive functioning; when resources are limited due to competing demands, task performance is impaired. Although some tasks are accomplished with relatively few resources (e.g., judging trustworthiness and emotion in others), others are more complex. Specifically, in the face of emotional ambiguity (i.e., stimuli that do not convey a clear positive or negative meaning, such as a surprised facial expression), our decisions to approach or avoid appear to rely on the availability of top-down regulatory resources to overcome an initial negativity bias. Cognition-emotion interaction theories (e.g., dual competition) posit that emotion and executive processing rely on shared resources, suggesting that competing demands would hamper these regulatory responses towards emotional ambiguity. Here, we employed a 2x2 design to investigate the effects of load (low versus high) and domain (non-emotional vs. emotional) on evaluations of surprised faces. As predicted, there were domain-specific effects, such that categorizations of surprise were more negative for emotional than non-emotional loads. Consistent with prior work, low load (regardless of domain; i.e., domain-general) was associated with greater response competition on trials resulting in a positive categorization, showing that positive categorizations are characterized by an initial negativity. This effect was diminished under high load. These results lend insight into the resources supporting a positive valence bias by demonstrating that emotion-specific regulatory resources are important for overriding the initial negativity in response to emotional ambiguity. However, both domain-general and domain-specific loads impact the underlying processes.

Cognitive processes have been found to contribute substantially to the human errors that lead to construction accidents. Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that deals with storage and active processing and is critical to a number of different processes. As a departure in construction industry research, this study correlates attentional allocation (measured via eye tracking) with working memory to assess workers' situation awareness under different scenarios that expose workers to various hazards. To achieve this goal, this study merges research linking eye movements and workers' attention with research focused on working-memory load and decision making to evaluate what, how, and where a worker distributes his/her attention while performing a task under different working-memory loads. Path analysis models then examined the direct and indirect effect of different working-memory loads on hazard identification performance. The independent variable (working-memory load) is linked to the dependent variable (hazard identification) through a set of mediators (attention metrics). The results showed that the high-memory load condition delayed workers' hazard identification. The findings of this study emphasize the important role working memory plays in determining how and why workers in dynamic work environments fail to detect, comprehend, and/or respond to physical risks.

Object-based warping is a powerful visual illusion wherein space between features within figural regions is regularly overestimated compared with those within ground regions. Originally, the effect was only examined in displays of two-dimensional (2D) stimuli. The present study sought to examine whether object-based warping persists in more naturalistic viewing conditions, where additional contextual cues are present. Stimuli were presented with either three-dimensional (3D) printed objects (Experiment 1) or 3D objects in virtual reality (Experiments 2-4). The testing metric was actual distance of features (dots) compared with estimated distances made by participants. Responses for the 3D printed stimuli were measured with replica dots on a slide ruler device. The virtual reality experiments collected responses either with a computer mouse or motion-tracked controller and included manipulations of object type, spatial separation, viewing distance of stimuli, and head motion. A standard warping effect in 3D was observed in all experiments, although the effect was not present in one condition that elicits warping in 2D (Occluded Rectangle). The final experiment resolves this discrepancy by reducing the multicomponent object (Occluded Rectangle) to a single component figure, while demonstrating the influence of depth cues on the warping effect under occlusion. Collectively, these experiments reveal that object-based warping is a powerful effect, even in naturalistic settings.