Measuring Effects of Reflection on Learning – A Physiological Study

As an economical and feasible intervention, reflection demands learners using critical thinking to examine presented information, questioning its validity, and drawing conclusions based on the resulting ideas during a learning process. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the effects of practicing short, frequent and structured reflective breaks that are interspersed with the reading process of a learning material. It tries to reveal whether physiological signals can be used as appropriate indicators to reveal the actual changes of cognitive states while introducing different reflective breaks during learning. The recorded physiological signals include skin temperature, blood volume pulse, pulse volume amplitude, and pulse rate. The results show that while these embedded “reflection rituals” did not affect learners’ performance they had significantly impact on time on task, perceived learning and those learners' physiological (cognitive) states. Physiological data returned significant differences between the reading and reflection activity. Measurements of temperature and pulse rate are lower when covering the course equipped with additional reflection affordances while blood volume pulse and pulse volume amplitude are higher. In addition, applying statistics analysis to the physiological data exhumes significant differences between different types of reflection activities for those measurements including skin temperature, pulse volume amplitude and pulse

Investigating the effect of relative time delay on companion screen experiences

Mobile devices are increasingly used while watching television, leading to the development of companion apps that complement the content of programmes. A concern for these applications is the extent to which companion app and television content need to be temporally aligned for live synchronisation. In this study, 18 participants watched a nature programme while being shown companion content on a tablet. Temporal synchronisation of content between the devices was varied. Participants completed questionnaires measuring immersion and affect and were tested on their recall for companion app content. While there were no statistically significant effects on these measures, qualitative interviews with participants after viewing consistently revealed that longer 10s delays in content synchronisation were frustrating. This suggests that poor content synchronisation can produce a negative companion experience for viewers and should be avoided

Evaluating the Influence of Room Illumination on Camera-Based Physiological Measurements for the Assessment of Screen-Based Media

Camera-based solutions can be a convenient means of collecting physiological measurements indicative of psychological responses to stimuli. However, the low illumination playback conditions commonly associated with viewing screen-based media oppose the bright conditions recommended for accurately recording physiological data with a camera. A study was designed to determine the feasibility of obtaining physiological data, for psychological insight, in illumination conditions representative of real world viewing experiences. In this study, a novel method was applied for testing a first-of-its-kind system for measuring both heart rate and facial actions from video footage recorded with a single discretely-placed camera. Results suggest that conditions representative of a bright domestic setting should be maintained when using this technology, despite this being considered a sub-optimal playback condition. Further analyses highlight that even within this bright condition, both the camera-measured facial action and heart rate data contained characteristic errors. In future research, the influence of these performance issues on psychological insights may be mitigated by reducing the temporal resolution of the heart rate measurements and ignoring fast and low-intensity facial movements

Dynamic adaptation of streamed real-time E-learning videos over the internet

Even though the e-learning is becoming increasingly popular in the academic environment, the quality of synchronous e-learning video is still substandard and significant work needs to be done to improve it. The improvements have to be brought about taking into considerations both: the network requirements and the psycho- physical aspects of the human visual system. One of the problems of the synchronous e-learning video is that the head-and-shoulder video of the instructor is mostly transmitted. This video presentation can be made more interesting by transmitting shots from different angles and zooms. Unfortunately, the transmission of such multi-shot videos will increase packet delay, jitter and other artifacts caused by frequent changes of the scenes. To some extent these problems may be reduced by controlled reduction of the quality of video so as to minimise uncontrolled corruption of the stream. Hence, there is a need for controlled streaming of a multi-shot e-learning video in response to the changing availability of the bandwidth, while utilising the available bandwidth to the maximum. The quality of transmitted video can be improved by removing the redundant background data and utilising the available bandwidth for sending high-resolution foreground information. While a number of schemes exist to identify and remove the background from the foreground, very few studies exist on the identification and separation of the two based on the understanding of the human visual system. Research has been carried out to define foreground and background in the context of e-learning video on the basis of human psychology. The results have been utilised to propose methods for improving the transmission of e-learning videos. In order to transmit the video sequence efficiently this research proposes the use of Feed- Forward Controllers that dynamically characterise the ongoing scene and adjust the streaming of video based on the availability of the bandwidth. In order to satisfy a number of receivers connected by varied bandwidth links in a heterogeneous environment, the use of Multi-Layer Feed-Forward Controller has been researched. This controller dynamically characterises the complexity (number of Macroblocks per frame) of the ongoing video sequence and combines it with the knowledge of availability of the bandwidth to various receivers to divide the video sequence into layers in an optimal way before transmitting it into network. The Single-layer Feed-Forward Controller inputs the complexity (Spatial Information and Temporal Information) of the on-going video sequence along with the availability of bandwidth to a receiver and adjusts the resolution and frame rate of individual scenes to transmit the sequence optimised to give the most acceptable perceptual quality within the bandwidth constraints. The performance of the Feed-Forward Controllers have been evaluated under simulated conditions and have been found to effectively regulate the streaming of real-time e-learning videos in order to provide perceptually improved video quality within the constraints of the available bandwidth