A psychology literature study on modality related issues for multimodal presentation in crisis management

The motivation of this psychology literature study is to obtain modality related guidelines for real-time information presentation in crisis management environment. The crisis management task is usually companied by time urgency, risk, uncertainty, and high information density. Decision makers (crisis managers) might undergo cognitive overload and tend to show biases in their performances. Therefore, the on-going crisis event needs to be presented in a manner that enhances perception, assists diagnosis, and prevents cognitive overload. To this end, this study looked into the modality effects on perception, cognitive load, working memory, learning, and attention. Selected topics include working memory, dual-coding theory, cognitive load theory, multimedia learning, and attention. The findings are several modality usage guidelines which may lead to more efficient use of the user’s cognitive capacity and enhance the information perception

An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management

In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions

Multimodal reading and second language learning

Most of the texts that second language learners engage with include both text (written and/or spoken) and images. The use of images accompanying texts is believed to support reading comprehension and facilitate learning. Despite their widespread use, very little is known about how the presentation of multiple input sources affects the attentional demands and the underlying cognitive processes involved. This paper provides a review of research on multimodal reading, with a focus on attentional processing. It first introduces the relevant theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence provided in support of the use of pictures in reading. It then reviews studies that have looked at the processing of text and pictures in first and second language contexts. Based on this review, main gaps in research and future research directions are identified. The discussion provided in this paper aims at advancing research on multimodal reading in a second language. Achieving a better understanding of the underlying cognitive processes in multimodal reading is crucial to inform pedagogical practices and to develop theoretical accounts of second language multimodal reading

The Development of Attentional Biases for Faces in Infancy: A Developmental Systems Perspective

We present an integrative review of research and theory on major factors involved in the early development of attentional biases to faces. Research utilizing behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroscience measures with infant participants as well as comparative research with animal subjects are reviewed. We begin with coverage of research demonstrating the presence of an attentional bias for faces shortly after birth, such as newborn infants’ visual preference for face-like over non-face stimuli. The role of experience and the process of perceptual narrowing in face processing are examined as infants begin to demonstrate enhanced behavioral and neural responsiveness to mother over stranger, female over male, own- over other-race, and native over non-native faces. Next, we cover research on developmental change in infants’ neural responsiveness to faces in multimodal contexts, such as audiovisual speech. We also explore the potential influence of arousal and attention on early perceptual preferences for faces. Lastly, the potential influence of the development of attention systems in the brain on social-cognitive processing is discussed. In conclusion, we interpret the findings under the framework of Developmental Systems Theory, emphasizing the combined and distributed influence of several factors, both internal (e.g., arousal, neural development) and external (e.g., early social experience) to the developing child, in the emergence of attentional biases that lead to enhanced responsiveness and processing of faces commonly encountered in the native environment

The Role of Auditory-Visual Synchrony in Capture of Attention and Induction of Attentional State in Infancy

This study was designed to examine the types of events that are most effective in capturing infant attention and whether these attention-getting events also effectively elicit an attentional state and facilitate perception and learning. Despite the frequent use of attention-getters (AGs) - presenting an attention-grabbing event between trials to redirect attention and reduce data loss due to fussiness - relatively little is known about the influence of AGs on attentional state. A recent investigation revealed that the presentation of AGs not only captures attention, but also produces heart rate decelerations during habituation and faster dishabituation in a subsequent task, indicating changes in the state of sustained attention and enhanced stimulus processing (Domsch, Thomas, & Lohaus, 2010). Attention-getters are often multimodal, dynamic, and temporally synchronous; such highly redundant properties generally guide selective attention and are thought to coordinate multisensory information in early development. In the current study, 4-month-old infants were randomly assigned to one of three attention-getter AG conditions: synchronous AG, asynchronous AG, and no AG. Following the AG, infants completed a discrimination task with a partial-lag design, which allowed for the assessment of infants' ability to discriminate between familiar and novel stimuli while controlling for spontaneous recovery. Analyses indicated that the AG condition captured and induced an attentional state, regardless of the presence of temporal synchrony. Although the synchronous and asynchronous AG conditions produced similar patterns of attention in the AG session, during familiarization infants in the asynchronous AG condition showed a pattern of increasing HR across the task and had higher overall HR compared to the synchronous AG and no AG conditions. Implications of the effect of attention-getters and temporal synchrony on infant performance are discussed

Multimodal Fusion Interactions: A Study of Human and Automatic Quantification

In order to perform multimodal fusion of heterogeneous signals, we need to understand their interactions: how each modality individually provides information useful for a task and how this information changes in the presence of other modalities. In this paper, we perform a comparative study of how humans annotate two categorizations of multimodal interactions: (1) partial labels, where different annotators annotate the label given the first, second, and both modalities, and (2) counterfactual labels, where the same annotator annotates the label given the first modality before asking them to explicitly reason about how their answer changes when given the second. We further propose an alternative taxonomy based on (3) information decomposition, where annotators annotate the degrees of redundancy: the extent to which modalities individually and together give the same predictions, uniqueness: the extent to which one modality enables a prediction that the other does not, and synergy: the extent to which both modalities enable one to make a prediction that one would not otherwise make using individual modalities. Through experiments and annotations, we highlight several opportunities and limitations of each approach and propose a method to automatically convert annotations of partial and counterfactual labels to information decomposition, yielding an accurate and efficient method for quantifying multimodal interactions.Comment: International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI '23), Code available at: https://github.com/pliang279/PID. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2302.1224

Optimizing The Design Of Multimodal User Interfaces

Due to a current lack of principle-driven multimodal user interface design guidelines, designers may encounter difficulties when choosing the most appropriate display modality for given users or specific tasks (e.g., verbal versus spatial tasks). The development of multimodal display guidelines from both a user and task domain perspective is thus critical to the achievement of successful human-system interaction. Specifically, there is a need to determine how to design task information presentation (e.g., via which modalities) to capitalize on an individual operator\u27s information processing capabilities and the inherent efficiencies associated with redundant sensory information, thereby alleviating information overload. The present effort addresses this issue by proposing a theoretical framework (Architecture for Multi-Modal Optimization, AMMO) from which multimodal display design guidelines and adaptive automation strategies may be derived. The foundation of the proposed framework is based on extending, at a functional working memory (WM) level, existing information processing theories and models with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and other allied sciences. The utility of AMMO lies in its ability to provide designers with strategies for directing system design, as well as dynamic adaptation strategies (i.e., multimodal mitigation strategies) in support of real-time operations. In an effort to validate specific components of AMMO, a subset of AMMO-derived multimodal design guidelines was evaluated with a simulated weapons control system multitasking environment. The results of this study demonstrated significant performance improvements in user response time and accuracy when multimodal display cues were used (i.e., auditory and tactile, individually and in combination) to augment the visual display of information, thereby distributing human information processing resources across multiple sensory and WM resources. These results provide initial empirical support for validation of the overall AMMO model and a sub-set of the principle-driven multimodal design guidelines derived from it. The empirically-validated multimodal design guidelines may be applicable to a wide range of information-intensive computer-based multitasking environments

Augmenting Sensorimotor Control Using “Goal-Aware” Vibrotactile Stimulation during Reaching and Manipulation Behaviors

We describe two sets of experiments that examine the ability of vibrotactile encoding of simple position error and combined object states (calculated from an optimal controller) to enhance performance of reaching and manipulation tasks in healthy human adults. The goal of the first experiment (tracking) was to follow a moving target with a cursor on a computer screen. Visual and/or vibrotactile cues were provided in this experiment, and vibrotactile feedback was redundant with visual feedback in that it did not encode any information above and beyond what was already available via vision. After only 10 minutes of practice using vibrotactile feedback to guide performance, subjects tracked the moving target with response latency and movement accuracy values approaching those observed under visually guided reaching. Unlike previous reports on multisensory enhancement, combining vibrotactile and visual feedback of performance errors conferred neither positive nor negative effects on task performance. In the second experiment (balancing), vibrotactile feedback encoded a corrective motor command as a linear combination of object states (derived from a linear-quadratic regulator implementing a trade-off between kinematic and energetic performance) to teach subjects how to balance a simulated inverted pendulum. Here, the tactile feedback signal differed from visual feedback in that it provided information that was not readily available from visual feedback alone. Immediately after applying this novel “goal-aware” vibrotactile feedback, time to failure was improved by a factor of three. Additionally, the effect of vibrotactile training persisted after the feedback was removed. These results suggest that vibrotactile encoding of appropriate combinations of state information may be an effective form of augmented sensory feedback that can be applied, among other purposes, to compensate for lost or compromised proprioception as commonly observed, for example, in stroke survivors

Parental use of multimodal cues in the initiation of joint attention as a function of child hearing status.

In the current study, we examine how hearing parents use multimodal cuing to establish joint attention with their hearing (N=9) or deaf (N=9) children during a free-play session. The deaf children were all candidates for cochlear implantation who had not yet been implanted, and each hearing child was age-matched to a deaf child. We coded parents' use of auditory, visual, and tactile cues, alone and in different combinations, during both successful and failed bids for children's attention. Although our findings revealed no clear quantitative differences in parents' use of multimodal cues as a function of child hearing status, secondary analyses revealed that hearing parents of deaf children used shorter utterances while initiating joint attention than did hearing parents of hearing children. Hearing parents of deaf children also touched their children twice as often throughout the play session than did hearing parents of hearing children. These findings demonstrate that parents differentially accommodate the specific needs of their hearing and deaf children in subtle ways to establish communicative intent