Aiming to Deceive: Examining the Role of the Quiet Eye During Deceptive Aiming Actions

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Human Kinetics via the DOI in this record.In three experiments, we explored the use of deceptive gaze in soccer penalty takers using eye-tracking equipment. In Experiment 1, players competed against a goalkeeper while taking unconstrained shots. Results indicated that when players used deception (looking to the opposite side to which they shot), they extended the duration of their final aiming (quiet eye) fixation and maintained shooting accuracy. In Experiment 2, with no goalkeeper present, players still used extended quiet-eye durations when using a deceptive strategy, but this time, their accuracy suffered. In Experiment 3, we manipulated the goalkeeper's location while controlling for the use of peripheral vision and memory of goal size. Results indicated that increased quiet-eye durations were required when using deceptive aiming, and that accuracy was influenced by the position of the goalkeeper. We conclude that during deceptive aiming, soccer players maintain accuracy by covertly processing information related to the goalkeeper's location

Increased complexities in visual search behavior in skilled players for a self-paced aiming task

The badminton serve is an important shot for winning a rally in a match. It combines good technique with the ability to accurately integrate visual information from the shuttle, racket, opponent, and intended landing point. Despite its importance and repercussive nature, to date no study has looked at the visual search behaviors during badminton service in the singles discipline. Unlike anticipatory tasks (e.g., shot returns), the serve presents an opportunity to explore the role of visual search behaviors in movement control for self-paced tasks. Accordingly, this study examined skill-related differences in visual behavior during the badminton singles serve. Skilled (n D 12) and less skilled (n D 12) participants performed 30 serves to a live opponent, while real-time eye movements were captured using a mobile gaze registration system. Frame-by-frame analyses of 662 serves were made and the skilled players took a longer preparatory time before serving. Visual behavior of the skilled players was characterized by significantly greater number of fixations on more areas of interest per trial than the less skilled. In addition, the skilled players spent a significantly longer time fixating on the court and net, whereas the less skilled players found the shuttle to be more informative. Quiet eye (QE) duration (indicative of superior sports performance) however, did not differ significantly between groups which has implications on the perceived importance of QE in the badminton serve. Moreover, while visual behavior differed by skill level, considerable individual differences were also observed especially within the skilled players. This augments the need for not just group-level analyses, but individualized analysis for a more accurate representation of visual behavior. Findings from this study thus provide an insight to the possible visual search strategies as players serve in net-barrier games. Moreover, this study highlighted an important aspect of badminton relating to deception and the implications of interpreting visual behavior of players

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Changing the game:exploring infants' participation in early play routines

Play has proved to have a central role in children’s development, most notably in rule learning (Piaget, 1965; Sutton-Smith, 1979) and negotiation of roles and goals (Garvey, 1972; Bruner et al., 1976). Yet very little research has been done on early play. The present study focuses on early social games, i.e. vocal-kinetic play routines that mothers use to interact with infants from very early on. We explored 3-month-old infants and their mothers performing a routine game first in the usual way, then in two violated conditions: without gestures and without sound. The aim of the study is to investigate infants’ participation and expectations in the game and whether this participation is affected by changes in the multimodal format of the game. Infants’ facial expressions, gaze and body movements were coded to measure levels of engagement and affective state across the three conditions. Results showed a significant decrease in Limbs Movements and expressions of Positive Affect, an increase in Gaze Away and in Stunned Expression when the game structure was violated. These results indicate that the violated game conditions were experienced as less engaging, either because of an unexpected break in the established joint routine, or simply because they were weaker versions of the same game. Overall, our results suggest that structured, multimodal play routines may constitute interactional contexts that only work as integrated units of auditory and motor resources, representing early communicative contexts which prepare the ground for later, more complex multimodal interactions, such as verbal exchanges

How Hearing Impairment Affects Sentence Comprehension: Using Eye Fixations to Investigate the Duration of Speech Processing

The main objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which hearing impairment influences the duration of sentence processing. An eye-tracking paradigm is introduced that provides an online measure of how hearing impairment prolongs processing of linguistically complex sentences; this measure uses eye fixations recorded while the participant listens to a sentence. Eye fixations toward a target picture (which matches the aurally presented sentence) were measured in the presence of a competitor picture. Based on the recorded eye fixations, the single target detection amplitude, which reflects the tendency of the participant to fixate the target picture, was used as a metric to estimate the duration of sentence processing. The single target detection amplitude was calculated for sentence structures with different levels of linguistic complexity and for different listening conditions: in quiet and in two different noise conditions. Participants with hearing impairment spent more time processing sentences, even at high levels of speech intelligibility. In addition, the relationship between the proposed online measure and listener-specific factors, such as hearing aid use and cognitive abilities, was investigated. Longer processing durations were measured for participants with hearing impairment who were not accustomed to using a hearing aid. Moreover, significant correlations were found between sentence processing duration and individual cognitive abilities (such as working memory capacity or susceptibility to interference). These findings are discussed with respect to audiological applications

Exploiting Group Structures to Infer Social Interactions From Videos

In this thesis, we consider the task of inferring the social interactions between humans by analyzing multi-modal data. Specifically, we attempt to solve some of the problems in interaction analysis, such as long-term deception detection, political deception detection, and impression prediction. In this work, we emphasize the importance of using knowledge about the group structure of the analyzed interactions. Previous works on the matter mostly neglected this aspect and analyzed a single subject at a time. Using the new Resistance dataset, collected by our collaborators, we approach the problem of long-term deception detection by designing a class of histogram-based features and a novel class of meta-features we callLiarRank. We develop a LiarOrNot model to identify spies in Resistance videos. We achieve AUCs of over 0.70 outperforming our baselines by 3% and human judges by 12%. For the problem of political deception, we first collect a dataset of videos and transcripts of 76 politicians from 18 countries making truthful and deceptive statements. We call it the Global Political Deception Dataset. We then show how to analyze the statements in a broader context by building a Video-Article-Topic graph. From this graph, we create a novel class of features called Deception Score that captures how controversial each topic is and how it affects the truthfulness of each statement. We show that our approach achieves 0.775 AUC outperforming competing baselines. Finally, we use the Resistance data to solve the problem of dyadic impression prediction. Our proposed Dyadic Impression Prediction System (DIPS) contains four major innovations: a novel class of features called emotion ranks, sign imbalance features derived from signed graphs theory, a novel method to align the facial expressions of subjects, and finally, we propose the concept of a multilayered stochastic network we call Temporal Delayed Network. Our DIPS architecture beats eight baselines from the literature, yielding statistically significant improvements of 19.9-30.8% in AUC

Quiet Eye research – Joan Vickers on target

In this target article (TA; CISS2016_100), Joan Vickers gives an overview of 20 years of research on her discovery that a relatively long lasting fixation before movement initiation enhances complex-motor performance, the so-called Quiet Eye (QE) phenomenon. Vickers’ main article (CISS2016_101) is the focus of sixteen peer commentaries (CISS2016_102 – CISS2016_117), authored by sport scientists with a special focus on the QE (Causer; Farrow & Panchuk; Klostermann, Vater & Kredel; Mann, Wright & Janelle; Schorer, Tirp & Rienhoff; Williams; Wilson, Wood & Vine), by sport scientists with different research foci (Baker & Wattie; Davids & Araujo; Frank & Schack; Helsen, Levin, Ziv & Davare; Rodrigues & Navarro), and by experts in human perception from disciplines beyond sport science (Foulsham; Gegenfurtner & Szulewski; Spering & Schütz; Watson & Enns). Finally, critiques, suggestions, and extensions brought forward by the commentators are acknowledged by Vickers in her closing response (CISS2016_118)

Understanding performance under pressure: anxiety, attention, cognitive biases and the perception of failure

It is consistently found that heightened anxiety leads to poorer performance in sport environments, with the majority of research reporting that disrupted attentional mechanisms explain the negative anxiety-performance relationship. However, there has been little exploration of why sports performers might become anxious in the first instance. Additionally, the effect these different interpretations of pressure might have on attentional control and performance has not been explored. These two issues drove the main aims of the current thesis, which sought to test the predictions of a new theory developed by researchers in the anxiety-performance area. First, the thesis systematically collated the evidence in regards to the attentional mechanisms underpinning the anxiety-performance relationship to determine the consensus in the sporting literature, including the challenges and areas of emergent or current research. Second, the thesis addressed the research challenges highlighted in the review by exploring the Attentional Control Theory Sport (ACTS; Eysenck & Wilson, 2016) with the aim to understand what initiates the anxiety response in individuals, in particular through the interpretation of pressure. The first experimental study examined the cognitive biases element of ACTS and investigated whether attention and interpretive bias as moderating variables of state anxiety are related to trait anxiety and attentional control, with the intention of better understanding what pre-empts experiencing cognitive biases. The second experimental study examined the perception of failure by determining whether perceived probability and cost of failure influenced the experience of state anxiety. Finally, the third experimental study built upon the aims from the previous studies and examined the hypothesised relationships between cognitive biases, perception of failure and state anxiety, attentional control and performance. This work is the first to empirically examine the theoretically derived predictions of ACTS, through exploring attentional and interpretive biases, perceived probability and cost of failure and the influence on momentary state anxiety, attentional control and performance