Decision-Making in a Social Multi-Armed Bandit Task: Behavior, Electrophysiology and Pupillometry

Understanding, predicting, and learning from other people's actions are fundamental human social-cognitive skills. Little is known about how and when we consider other's actions and outcomes when making our own decisions. We developed a novel task to study social influence in decision-making: the social multi-armed bandit task. This task assesses how people learn policies for optimal choices based on their own outcomes and another player's (observed) outcomes. The majority of participants integrated information gained through observation of their partner similarly as information gained through their own actions. This lead to a suboptimal decision-making strategy. Interestingly, event-related potentials time-locked to stimulus onset qualitatively similar but the amplitudes are attenuated in the solo compared to the dyadic version. This might indicate that arousal and attention after receiving a reward are sustained when a second agent is present but not when playing alone.Comment: Accepted for publication in The 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019

Pupillometric analysis for assessment of gene therapy in Leber Congenital Amaurosis patients

Background: Objective techniques to assess the amelioration of vision in patients with impaired visual function are needed to standardize efficacy assessment in gene therapy trials for ocular diseases. Pupillometry has been investigated in several diseases in order to provide objective information about the visual reflex pathway and has been adopted to quantify visual impairment in patients with Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA). In this paper, we describe detailed methods of pupillometric analysis and a case study on three Italian patients affected by Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA) involved in a gene therapy clinical trial at two follow-up time-points: 1 year and 3 years after therapy administration. Methods: Pupillary light reflexes (PLR) were measured in patients who had received a unilateral subretinal injection in a clinical gene therapy trial. Pupil images were recorded simultaneously in both eyes with a commercial pupillometer and related software. A program was generated with MATLAB software in order to enable enhanced pupil detection with revision of the acquired images (correcting aberrations due to the inability of these severely visually impaired patients to fixate), and computation of the pupillometric parameters for each stimulus. Pupil detection was performed through Hough Transform and a non-parametric paired statistical test was adopted for comparison. Results: The developed program provided correct pupil detection also for frames in which the pupil is not totally visible. Moreover, it provided an automatic computation of the pupillometric parameters for each stimulus and enabled semi-automatic revision of computerized detection, eliminating the need for the user to manually check frame by frame. With reference to the case study, the amplitude of pupillary constriction and the constriction velocity were increased in the right (treated eye) compared to the left (untreated) eye at both follow-up time-points, showing stability of the improved PLR in the treated eye. Conclusions: Our method streamlined the pupillometric analyses and allowed rapid statistical analysis of a range of parameters associated with PLR. The results confirm that pupillometry is a useful objective measure for the assessment of therapeutic effect of gene therapy in patients with LCA

Physiological assessment of operator workload during manual tracking. 1: Pupillary responses

The feasibility of pupillometry as an indicator for assessing operator workload during manual tracking was studied. The mean and maximum pupillary responses of 12 subjects performing tracking tasks with three levels of difficulty (bandwidth of the forcing function were 0.15, 0.30 and 0.50 Hz respectively) were analysed. The results showed that pupillary dilation increased significantly as a function of the tracking difficulty which was reflected by the significant increase of tracking error (RMS). The present study supplies additional evidence that pupillary response is a sensitive and reliable index which may serve as an indicator for assessing operator workload in man-machine systems

Lexis or parsing? A corpus-based study of syntactic complexity and its effect on disfluencies in interpreting

Cognitive load is probably one of the most cited topics in research on simultaneous interpreting, but it is still poorly understood due to the lack of proper empirical tests. It is a central concept in Gile’s (2009) Efforts Model as well as Seeber’s (2011) Cognitive Load Model. Both models invariably conceptualize interpreting as a dynamic equilibrium between the cognitive resources/capacities and cognitive demands that are involved in listening and comprehension, production and memory storage. In cases when the momentary demands exceed the interpreter’s available capacities, there is an information overload which typically results in a disfluent or erroneous interpretation. While Gile (2008) denies his Efforts Model is a theory that can be tested, Seeber & Kerzel (2012) put Seeber’s Cognitive Load Model to the test using pupillometry in an experimental interpretation task. In a series of recent corpus-based studies Plevoets & Defrancq (2016, 2018) and Defrancq & Plevoets (2018) used filled pauses to investigate cognitive load in simultaneous interpreters, based on the widely shared assumption in the psycholinguistic literature that silent and filled pauses are ‘windows’ on cognitive load in monolingual speech (Arnold et al. 2000; Bortfeld et al. 2001; Clark & Fox Tree 2002; Levelt 1983; Watanabe et al. 2008). The studies found empirical support for increased cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting in the form of higher frequencies of filled pauses. However, the studies also showed that filled pauses in interpreting are caused mainly by problems with lexical retrieval. Plevoets & Defrancq (2016) observed that interpreters produce more instances of the filled pause uh(m) when the lexical density of their own output is higher. Plevoets & Defrancq (2018) demonstrated that the frequency of uh(m) in interpreting increases when the lexical density of the source text is also higher but it decreases when there are more formulaic sequences. This effect of formulaicity was found in both the source texts and the target texts. Other known obstacles in interpreting, such as the presence of numbers and rate of delivery do not significantly affect the frequency of filled pauses (although source speech delivery rate reached significance in one of the analyses). These results point to the problematic retrieval or access of lexical items as the primary source of cognitive load for interpreters. Finally, in a study of filled pauses occurring between the members of morphological compounds, Defrancq & Plevoets (2018) showed that interpreters produced more uh(m)’s than non-interpreters when the average frequency of the compounds was high as well as when the average frequency of the component members was high. This also demonstrates that lexical retrieval, which is assumed to be easier for more frequent items, is hampered in interpreting. This study critically examines the results of the previous studies by analyzing the effect of another non-lexical parameter on the production of filled pauses in interpreting, viz. syntactic complexity. Subordinating constructions are a well-known predictor of processing cost (cognitive load) in both L1 research (Gordon, Luper & Peterson 1986; Gordon & Luper 1989) and L2 research (Norris & Ortega 2009; Osborne 2011). In interpreting, however, Dillinger (1994) and Setton (1999: 270) did not find strong effects of the syntactic embedding of the source texts on the interpreters’ performance. As a consequence, this paper will take a closer look on syntactic complexity and it will do so by incorporating the number of hypotactic clauses into the analysis. The study is corpus-based and makes use of both a corpus of interpreted language and a corpus of non-mediated speech. The corpus of interpreted language is the EPICG corpus, which is compiled at Ghent University between 2010 and 2013. It consists of French, Spanish and Dutch interpreted speeches in the European Parliament from 2006 until 2008, which are transcribed according to the VALIBEL guidelines (Bachy et al. 2007). For the purposes of this study a sub-corpus of French source speeches and their Dutch interpretations is used, amounting to a total of 140 000 words. This sub-corpus is annotated for lemmas, parts-of-speech and chunks (Van de Kauter et al. 2013), and it is sentence-aligned with WinAlign (SDL Trados WinAlign 2014). The corpus of non-mediated speech is the sub-corpus of political debates of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (Oostdijk 2000). The corpus was compiled between 1998 and 2003, and it is annotated for lemmas and parts-of-speech. The political sub-corpus contains 220 000 words of Netherlandic Dutch and 140 000 words of Belgian Dutch. The data are analysed with a Generalized Additive Mixed-effects Model (Wood 2017) in which the frequency of the disfluency uh(m) is predicted in relation to delivery rate, lexical density, percentage of numbers, formulaicity and syntactic complexity. Delivery rate is measured as the number of words per minute, lexical density as the number of content words per utterance length, percentage of numbers as the numbers of numbers per utterance length and formulaicity as the number of n-grams per utterance length. The new predictor, syntactic complexity, is measured as the number of subordinate clauses per utterance length. Because all five predictors are numeric variables, their effects are modelled with smoothing splines which automatically detect potential nonlinear patterns in the data. The observations are at utterance-level and are nested within the speeches, so the possible between-speech variation is accounted for with a random factor. The preliminary results confirm the hypothesis: while lexical density and formulaicity show similar (positive, resp. negative) effects to what is reported in previous research, the syntactic complexity of the source text is ‘border-significant’ and the syntactic complexity of the target is non-significant. There are some sporadic differences among certain types of subordinate clauses, but the general conclusion is indeed that syntactic complexity is not such a strong trigger of cognitive load in interpreting in comparison to lexically-related factors. That calls for a model of interpreting in which depth of processing plays only a marginal role

Aerospace Medicine and Biology. A continuing bibliography with indexes

This bibliography lists 244 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in February 1981. Aerospace medicine and aerobiology topics are included. Listings for physiological factors, astronaut performance, control theory, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics are included

Temporal dynamics of motivation-cognitive control interactions revealed by high-resolution pupillometry

Motivational manipulations, such as the presence of performance-contingent reward incentives, can have substantial influences on cognitive control. Previous evidence suggests that reward incentives may enhance cognitive performance specifically through increased preparatory, or proactive, control processes. The present study examined reward influences on cognitive control dynamics in the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), using high-resolution pupillometry. In the AX-CPT, contextual cues must be actively maintained over a delay in order to appropriately respond to ambiguous target probes. A key feature of the task is that it permits dissociable characterization of preparatory, proactive control processes (i.e., utilization of context) and reactive control processes (i.e., target-evoked interference resolution). Task performance profiles suggested that reward incentives enhanced proactive control (context utilization). Critically, pupil dilation was also increased on reward incentive trials during context maintenance periods, suggesting trial-specific shifts in proactive control, particularly when context cues indicated the need to overcome the dominant target response bias. Reward incentives had both transient (i.e., trial-by-trial) and sustained (i.e., block-based) effects on pupil dilation, which may reflect distinct underlying processes. The transient pupillary effects were present even when comparing against trials matched in task performance, suggesting a unique motivational influence of reward incentives. These results suggest that pupillometry may be a useful technique for investigating reward motivational signals and their dynamic influence on cognitive control

Suitability of open-field autorefractors as pupillometers and instrument design effects

AIM: To determine the agreement and repeatability of the pupil measurement obtained with VIP-200 (Neuroptics), PowerRef II (Plusoptix), WAM-5500 (Grand Seiko) and study the effects of instrument design on pupillometry. METHODS: Forty patients were measured twice in low, mid and high mesopic. Repeatability was analyzed with the within-subject standard deviation (Sw) and paired t-tests. Agreement was studied with Bland-Altman plots and repeated measures ANOVA. Instrument design analysis consisted on measuring pupil size with PowerRef II simulating monocular and binocular conditions as well as with proximity cues and without proximity cues. RESULTS: The mean difference (standard deviation) between test-retest for low, mid and high mesopic conditions were, respectively: -0.09 (+/- 0.16), -0.05 (+/- 0.18) and -0.08 (+/- 0.23) mm for Neuroptics, -0.05 (+/- 0.17), -0.12 (+/- 0.23) and -0.17 (+/- 0.34) mm for WAM-5500, -0.04 (+/- 0.27), -0.13 (+/- 0.37) and -0.11 (+/- 0.28) mm for PowerRef II. Regarding agreement with Neuroptics, the mean difference for low, mid and high mesopic conditions were, respectively: -0.48 (+/- 0.35), -0.83 (+/- 0.52) and -0.38 (+/- 0.56) mm for WAM-5500, -0.28 (+/- 0.56),-0.70 (+/- 0.55) and -0.61 (+/- 0.54) mm for PowerRef II. The mean difference of binocular minus monocular pupil measurements was: -0.83 (+/- 0.87) mm; and with proximity cues minus without proximity cues was: -0.30 (+/- 0.77) mm. CONCLUSION: All the instruments show similar repeatability. In all illumination conditions, agreement of Neuroptics with WAM-5500 and PowerRef II is not good enough, which can be partially induced due to their open field design.Postprint (published version

Detección del fenómeno de Bell previo al reflejo pupilar a la luz

Contribución como póster al Simposio de Ciencias de la Visión en la XI Reunión Nacional de ÓpticaEl desarrollo de un video-oculógrafo binocular con resolución 15 micras y 4 ms orientado a la caracterización de los reflejos pupilares ha revelado la existencia de un movimiento de elevación del globo ocular, conocido como fenómeno de Bell, previo al reflejo pupilar a la luz. Además, su uso para el análisis del reflejo pupilar a la luz ha confirmado que las respuestas pupilares directa y consensual no presentan ninguna diferencia temporal apreciabl

Music Chills: The Eye Pupil as a Window to the Soul of Music

Strong emotional and bodily experiences with music are a very complex phenomenon that may be best observed in terms of the involuntary bodily reactions that can accompany strong musical experiences. Based on the relationship between the activation of noradrenaline (NE) and changes in pupil size, there is a theoretical ground for studying pupillary reactions when experiencing music chills. In the present study, participants listened to self-chosen songs versus control songs chosen by the other participants, since findings from previous studies indicated that self-chosen songs were more effective in evoking chills during listening. The experiment included a passive condition, and an active condition where participants made key presses to indicate when experiencing chills. The present findings supported the hypothesis and strengthen the relationship between the activation of NE, seen as changes in pupil size, while experiencing chills. Control songs never showed stronger effects than the experimental songs, which speaks for the subjective quality of the experience. Interestingly, physiological responses to chills decreased with listening time. The present results extend and support previous studies of chills and music