Detection of behavioral patterns for increasing attentiveness level

In the current world, performance is one of the most important issues concerning work and competition. Performance is strongly connected with learning and when it comes to acquiring new knowledge, attention is one the most important mechanisms as the level of the learner’s attention affects learning results. When students are doing learning activities using new technologies, it is extremely important that the teacher has some feedback from the students’ work in order to detect potential learning problems at an early stage. The goal of this research is to propose a system that measures the level of attentiveness in real scenarios, and detects patterns of behavior associated to different attention levels among different students. This system measures attention and uses this information for training a decision support system that shows the level of attention of a group of students in real time.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Different effects of adding white noise on cognitive performance of sub-, normal and super-attentive school children

Objectives: Noise often has detrimental effects on performance. However, because of the phenomenon of stochastic resonance (SR), auditory white noise (WN) can alter the "signal to noise'' ratio and improve performance. The Moderate Brain Arousal (MBA) model postulates different levels of internal "neural noise'' in individuals with different attentional capacities. This in turn determines the particular WN level most beneficial in each individual case-with one level of WN facilitating poor attenders but hindering super-attentive children. The objective of the present study is to find out if added WN affects cognitive performance differently in children that differ in attention ability. Methods: Participants were teacher-rated super-(N = 25); normal-(N = 29) and sub-attentive (N = 36) children (aged 8 to 10 years). Two non-executive function (EF) tasks (a verbal episodic recall task and a delayed verbal recognition task) and two EF tasks (a visuo-spatial working memory test and a Go-NoGo task) were performed under three WN levels. The non-WN condition was only used to control for potential differences in background noise in the group testing situations. Results: There were different effects of WN on performance in the three groups-adding moderate WN worsened the performance of super-attentive children for both task types and improved EF performance in sub-attentive children. The normal-attentive children's performance was unaffected by WN exposure. The shift from moderate to high levels of WN had little further effect on performance in any group. Significance: The predicted differential effect of WN on performance was confirmed. However, the failure to find evidence for an inverted U function challenges current theories. Alternative explanations are discussed. We propose that WN therapy should be further investigated as a possible non-pharmacological treatment for inattention

European Starlings (Sturnus Vulgaris) : Avian Model and Monitor of Contaminant and Remedial Effects at Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge

WMRC Project #94-12

Assess and enhancing attention in learning activities

The rapid progress of technologies has enabled the development of innovative environment in learning activities when the student used computer devices with access to Internet. The goal of this paper is to propose an ambient intelligent (AmI) system, directed at the teacher that indicates the level of attention of the students in the class when it requires the use of the computer connected to the Internet. This AmI system captures, measures, and supervises the interaction of each student with the computer (or laptop) and indicates the level of attention of students in the activities proposed by the teacher. When the teacher has big class, he/she can visualize in real time the level of engagement of the students in the proposed activities and act accordingly when necessary. Measurements of attention level are obtained by a proposed model, and user for training a decision support system that in a real scenario makes recommendations for the teachers so as to prevent undesirable behaviour and change the learning styles.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Assessing the Effects of Survey Instructions and Physical Attractiveness on Careless Responding in Online Surveys

The current study explored the effects of survey instructions (basic, warning, feedback) and survey administrator appearance (invisible administrator, higher attractiveness, lower attractiveness) on careless responding in online surveys. Undergraduate students (N = 527) were randomly assigned to one of nine experimental conditions and completed an online survey regarding personality, attitudes and experiences in University. Three two-way ANOVAs and one two-way ANCOVA were used in this study. Conscientiousness was used as a covariate and careless responding behavior was measured by total survey response time, response consistency, response patterns, and self-reported carelessness. The findings indicated that higher levels of conscientiousness were related to lower levels of self-reported carelessness, and that survey instructions and survey administrator appearance do have some influence on careless responding behavior

Investigating dynamics in attentive and inattentive responding together with their contextual correlates using a novel mixture IRT model for intensive longitudinal data

In ecological momentary assessment (EMA), respondents answer brief questionnaires about their current behaviors or experiences several times per day across multiple days. The frequent measurement enables a thorough grasp of the dynamics inherent in psychological traits, but it also increases respondent burden. To lower this burden, respondents may engage in careless and insufficient effort responding (C/IER) and leave data contaminated with responses that do not reflect what researchers want to measure. We introduce a novel approach to investigate C/IER in EMA data. Our approach combines a confirmatory mixture item response theory model separating C/IER from attentive behavior with latent Markov factor analysis. This allows for (1) gauging the occurrence of C/IER and (2) studying transitions among states of different response behaviors as well as their contextual correlates. The approach can be implemented using standard R packages. In an empirical application, we showcase the efficacy of this approach in both pinpointing C/IER instances in EMA and gaining insights into their underlying causes. In a simulation study investigating robustness against unaccounted changes in measurement models underlying attentive responses, the approach proved robust against heterogeneity in loading patterns but not against heterogeneity in the factor structure. Extensions to accommodate the latter are discussed.<br/

Processing of Visual and Social Stimuli in the Green Anole Lizard Brain

Many studies of animal behavior use video technology to mimic live interactions and minimize the variability of natural animal behavior. Here, I seek to understand how information processing differs among Anolis carolinensis (green anole lizards) exposed to a live lizard compared to a video representation of a lizard. I conducted behavioral trials in which I placed a male lizard in a visually neutral arena, presented it with visual information from a live anole or from carefully constructed video playback, and recorded their behavioral responses. Each lizard (n=40) was randomly assigned to one of four treatments – Live Anole (two live males interacting with each other), Anole Video (focal lizard shown video of a lizard displaying on a perch), Scrambled Video (focal lizard shown video of a lizard displaying on a perch, but with the pixels scrambled to remove social context), or Control (focal lizard shown video of a stationary perch). Immediately after each trial, lizard brains were flash-frozen in isopentane. To measure neural activity, I then used immunocytochemistry to quantify expression levels of the immediate early gene c-fos in two visual brain regions, the Nucleus Rotundus (NROT) and Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN), and one social brain region, the Pre-Optic Area (POA). Behaviorally, I found that lizards in the Live Anole and Anole Video conditions did not differ in social display behaviors (pushups and dewlap extensions) or attentiveness, but lizards in both these conditions displayed more than lizards in the Scrambled Video and Control conditions – evidence that suggests there is no difference in lizard’s behavioral responses to live lizards compared to video lizards. I also found evidence for the inhibitory nature of the POA, as the POA showed the least neural activity in the Live Anole condition, and there was a negative correlation between attentiveness and POA activity within the Live Anole condition. Finally, I saw no differences in LGN and NROT activity across the four treatments, providing evidence that lizards process visual information in the visual brain regions independently of the social context of that information. Overall, this study provides a greater understanding of the behavioral similarities, but neural differences, in visual and social processing of a live anole compared to a video representation of an anole, suggesting caution in the use of video representations of behavior

Learning frequent behaviors patterns in intelligent environments for attentiveness level

Nowadays, when it comes to achieving goals in business environments or educational environments, the performance successfully has an important role in performing a task. However, this performance can be affected by several factors. One of the most common is the lack of attention. The individual’s attention in performing a task can be determinant for the final quality or even at the task’s conclusion. In this paper is intended to design a solution that can reduce or even eliminate the lack of attention on performing a task. The idea consist on develop an architecture that capture the user behavior through the mouse and keyboard usage. Furthermore, the system will analyze how the devices are used.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Supervising attention in an E-learning system

Until now, the level of attention of a worker has been evaluated through his/her productivity: the more one produces, the better his/her attention at work. First, the worst aspect about this approach is that it only points out a potential decrease of attention after a productivity loss. An approach that could point out, in advance, upcoming breaks in attention could allow active/preventive interventions rather than reactive ones. In this paper we present a distributed system for monitoring attention in teams (of people). It is especially suited for people working with computers and it can be interesting for domains such as the workplace or the classroom. It constantly analyzes the behavior of the user while interacting with the computer and together with knowledge about the task, is able to temporally classify attention.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 andFCT –Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013