Positioning Eye Fixation and Vehicle Movement: Visual-motor Coordination Assessment in Naturalistic Driving

In recent years, many driving studies in the traffic safety literature have undertaken error assessments of driver behaviour. However, few studies have been able to analyse the detailed individual vision and motor behaviours of drivers, due to the lack of reliable data and available technologies. Therefore, little is currently known about drivers' visual-motor coordination involving the use of visual information to regulate their physical movements. This research sets-up a technical framework to investigate on-road drivers' visual-motor coordination via vision tracking and vehicle positioning. The driving behaviour and performance were recorded and analysed using Eye Movement Tracking, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The eye tracker recorded eye fixations and duration on video images to analyse the visual pattern of individual drivers. Real-time kinematic (RTK) post-processing of multi-GNSS generated vehicle movement trajectory at centimetre-level accuracy horizontally, which encompasses precise lateral positioning, speed and acceleration parameters of driving behaviours. The eye fixation data was then geocoded and synchronised with the vehicle movement trajectory in order to investigate the visual-motor coordination of the drivers. A prototype of implementation of the framework focusing on complex U-turn manoeuvre at a roundabout in five older drivers was presented in this paper. The visualisation of spatial-temporal patterns of visual-motor coordination for individual drivers allows for a greater insight to behaviour assessment. The on-road driving test in this study has also demonstrated a discriminant and ecologically valid approach in driving behaviour assessment, which can be used in studies with other cohort population

Gaze-Guided Narratives for Outdoor Tourism

Many outdoor spaces have hidden stories connected with them that can be used for enriching a tourist’s experience. Previous work on locative media has suggested to include these stories by guiding users to relevant places through positioning technology. However, stories are often related to environmental features which are far from the user, far apart from each other, and therefore difficult to explore by locomotion, but can be visually explored from a vantage point. Telling a story from a vantage point is challenging since the system must ensure that the user can identify the relevant features in the environment. This position paper suggests using eye tracking for enabling gaze-guided narratives as a novel interaction principle. The idea is to tell a story based on its formal and location-dependent specification, and dynamically depending on the user’s current and previous gaze on a panorama

A Bibliometric Study on Eye-Tracking Research in Tourism

The purpose of this paper is to determine the position of eye-tracking studies in the tourism literature and to provide a panoramic perspective of social and intellectual structures of eye-tracking studies in tourism. Bibliometric methods have been used to analyze 64 studies published from 2013 – 2019. Descriptive, network, and cluster analyses were applied in the R statistics program. The annual growth rate on eye-tracking research in tourism was 38.31%. Most of the authors preferred to cite articles from tourism journals. Effective researchers preferred to use "eye-tracking" and "visual attention" as author keywords in their research. Most of the studies took place in a laboratory environment. The studies discussed many dimensions such as culture, language, website design, advertising strategies, satisfaction, and usability. However, the effect of marketing and behavior studies is remarkable. Institutions and countries with close geographical links tended to publish together, but countries such as the USA, the UK, China, and Australia come to the fore in the collaboration network. Scopus-indexed English publications, most of which are articles, and proceedings were analyzed. Future studies may use different academic databases and publication types. This study is one of the first bibliometric analyses of eye-tracking studies in tourism

Modeling Gaze-Guided Narratives for Outdoor Tourism

Many outdoor spaces have hidden stories connected with them that can be used to enrich a tourist’s experience. These stories are often related to environmental features which are far from the user and far apart from each other. Therefore they are difficult to explore by locomotion, but can be visually explored from a vantage point. Telling a story from a vantage point is challenging since the system must ensure that the user can identify the relevant features in the environment. Gaze-guided narratives are an interaction concept that helps in such situations by telling a story dynamically depending on the user’s current and previous gaze on a panorama. This chapter suggests a formal modeling approach for gaze-guided narratives, based on narrative mediation trees. The approach is illustrated with an example from the Swiss saga around ’Wilhelm Tell

Mobility and Aging: Older Drivers’ Visual Searching, Lane Keeping and Coordination

This thesis examined older drivers’ mobility and behaviour through comprehensive measurements of driver-vehicle-environment interaction and investigated the associations between driving behaviour and cognitive functions. Data were collected and analysed for 50 older drivers using eye tracking, GNSS tracking, and GIS. Results showed that poor selective attention, spatial ability and executive function in older drivers adversely affect lane keeping, visual search and coordination. Visual-motor coordination measure is sensitive and effective for driving assessment in older drivers

Rekonstruktion von Orten als sozialem Phänomen. Geoinformatische Analyse semantisch annotierter Verhaltensdaten ; Promotionstitel: Ein Framework zur geoinformatischen Analyse von semantisch annotierten Verhaltensdaten zur Rekonstruktion von Orten als sozialem Phänomen

Im Feld der Angewandten Informatik leistet die Arbeit einen Beitrag im Bereich ortsbezogene Geoinformationssysteme, indem durch einen räumlichen Lösungsansatz für eine ortsbezogene Verbundoperation eine bislang nicht verfügbare Funktion (Ähnlichkeit auf Orten) über unterschiedliche Datenarten und -quellen realisiert werden konnte, die sich für einen wichtigen Anwendungsfall (touristische Exploration einer Stadt) als äußerst produktiv erwiesen hat. Das Vorgehen, Zusammenhang zwischen Orten über partielle räumliche Koinzidenz herzustellen, steht dabei komplementär zu bisherigen Ansätzen, Verknüpfungen im Sinne des Qualitativen Räumlichen Schließens ausschließlich auf Ebene des verfügbaren ortsbezogenen Wissens herzustellen.In the area of applied computer science, the work contributes in the field of geo-information systems. A specific spatial approach for the implementation of a place-based join helped to provide a previously unavailable function (similarity of places) across different data types and sources which has provided valid results for an important use case (touristic exploration of a city). Establishing place-based joins via partial coincidence of footprints is complementary to previous approaches which establish links exclusively by qualitative spatial reasoning at the level of place-based knowledge

Closing the digital gap: handheld computing, adult first-time users, and a user experience metric model

This thesis assesses the speed of adaptation and adoption of computing systems from an adult first-time user perspective in South Africa, with the aim of determining if it could ultimately lead to the reduction of the existing digital gap. As is evident from the social, educational, and economical gap for some observers, the reality of the existence of the digital gap in South Africa is undeniable. Constant non-targeted progress is made toward addressing imbalances, which seem to be more visible as the number of constant and permanent users is visibly increasing. These observed phenomena are mostly noticed amongst urban, educated, younger, middle-class citizens. The forgotten “missing middle” are left to fend for themselves. These are people who are still outside the digital drive the world is experiencing based on their schooling grade, geographical location, income level, and age. They were not in school when computer literacy was introduced, and they were too poor to teach themselves how to use a computer, too remote to observe the digital drive, and too old to learn from their peers. As citizens, their welfare matters, and when assessing the penetration of ICT in the country, their numbers also matter. One cannot ignore their presence and the difficulties and frustration that they experience when coming into contact with a computing system for the first time. The researcher is of the view that the presence of a computing system may not simply translate to the closure of the digital gap. In other words, people may gain access to a computer, but without computing usability skills or Internet connectivity it may not add value to their daily activities. Closing the digital gap in South Africa can be seen as political propaganda, but the reality is, how do we measure and assess it? It comes down to users, and in this particular case, attention is turned to the “missing middle”, here referred to as the adult first-time user. This is simply someone who is over the age of 18 years, lives in a rural community in South Africa, never completed school, and is using a computer for the first time. The researcher used a handheld tablet system as a tool to assess the participants’ adequacy in terms of the rate at which they complete tasks by developing mathematical equations which were placed together within an assessment metric that was later used to determine user proficiency, as well as their adaptation and user experience in order to determine if the participant can later adopt the device and take advantage of it. By so doing, the metric will comprise variables such as the user movement time, task completion success rate, task completion speed, user satisfaction, user reaction time, user completion rate per activity, time-based efficiency, and the assessment of the level of frustration any adult first-time user may experience while interacting with the system for the first time. The term “digital gap” may not be new to the ICT sphere, but no one has taken the step towards assessing it. The digital gap is no longer the absence of computing systems in many communities but rather the presence of inadequate user experience, which has not been properly measured and documented. The user experience metric (UXM) that was developed in this study provided the researcher with the opportunity to reassess the issue of systems adaptation, adoption, and usability by adult first-time users. This research is particularly driven by sound interaction design principles, user adaptation, and usability and user experiencePh. D. (Information Systems)School of Computin

Moving through language: a behavioural and linguistic analysis of spatial mental model construction

Over the past few decades, our understanding of the cognitive processes underpinning our navigational abilities has expanded considerably. Models have been constructed that attempt to explain various key aspects of our wayfinding abilities, from the selection of salient features in environments to the processes involved in updating our position with respect to those features during movement. However, there remain several key open questions. Much of the research in spatial cognition has investigated visuospatial performance on the basis of sensory input (predominantly vision, but also sound, hapsis, and kinaesthesia), and while language production has been the subject of extensive research in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, many aspects of language encoding remain unexplored. The research presented in this thesis aimed to explore outstanding issues in spatial language processing, tying together conceptual ends from different fields that have the potential to greatly inform each other, but focused specifically on how landmark information and spatial reference frames are encoded in mental representations characterised by different spatial reference frames. The first five experiments introduce a paradigm in which subjects encode skeletal route descriptions containing egocentric (“left/right”) or allocentric (cardinal) relational terms, while they also intentionally maintain an imagined egocentric or allocentric viewpoint. By testing participants’ spatial knowledge either in an allocentric (Experiments 1-3) or in an egocentric task (Experiments 4 and 5) this research exploits the facilitation produced by encoding-test congruence to clarify the contribution of mental imagery during spatial language processing and spatial tasks. Additionally, Experiments 1-3 adopted an eye-tracking methodology to study the allocation of attention to landmarks in descriptions and sketch maps as a function of linguistic reference frame and imagined perspective, while also recording subjective self-reports of participants’ phenomenal experiences. Key findings include evidence that egocentric and allocentric relational terms may not map directly onto egocentric and allocentric imagined perspectives, calling into question a common assumptions of psycholinguistic studies of spatial language. A novel way to establish experimental control over mental representations is presented, together with evidence that specific eye gaze patterns on landmark words or landmark regions of maps can be diagnostic of different imagined spatial perspectives. Experiments 4 and 5 adopted the same key manipulations to the study of spatial updating and bearing estimation following encoding of short, aurally-presented route descriptions. By employing two different response modes in this triangle completion task, Experiments 4 and 5 attempted to address key issues of experimental control that may have caused the conflicting results found in the literature on spatial updating during mental navigation and visuospatial imagery. The impact of encoding manipulations and of differences in response modality on embodiment and task performance were explored. Experiments 6-8 subsequently attempted to determine the developmental trajectory for the ability to discriminate between navigationally salient and non-salient landmarks, and to translate spatial relations between different reference frames. In these developmental studies, children and young adolescents were presented with videos portraying journeys through virtual environments from an egocentric perspective, and tested their ability to translate the resulting representations in order to perform allocentric spatial tasks. No clear facilitation effect of decision-point landmarks was observed or any strong indication that salient navigational features are more strongly represented in memory within the age range we tested (four to 11 years of age). Possible reasons for this are discussed in light of the relevant literature and methodological differences. Globally, the results presented indicate a functional role of imagery during language processing, pointing to the importance of introspection and accurate task analyses when interpreting behavioural results. Additionally, the study of implicit measures of attention such as eye tracking measures has the potential to improve our understanding mental representations, and of how they mediate between perception, action, and language. Lastly, these results also suggest that synergy between seemingly distinct research areas may be key in better characterising the nature of mental imagery in its different forms, and that the phenomenology of imagery content will be an essential part of this and future research

Moving through language: a behavioural and linguistic analysis of spatial mental model construction

Over the past few decades, our understanding of the cognitive processes underpinning our navigational abilities has expanded considerably. Models have been constructed that attempt to explain various key aspects of our wayfinding abilities, from the selection of salient features in environments to the processes involved in updating our position with respect to those features during movement. However, there remain several key open questions. Much of the research in spatial cognition has investigated visuospatial performance on the basis of sensory input (predominantly vision, but also sound, hapsis, and kinaesthesia), and while language production has been the subject of extensive research in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, many aspects of language encoding remain unexplored. The research presented in this thesis aimed to explore outstanding issues in spatial language processing, tying together conceptual ends from different fields that have the potential to greatly inform each other, but focused specifically on how landmark information and spatial reference frames are encoded in mental representations characterised by different spatial reference frames. The first five experiments introduce a paradigm in which subjects encode skeletal route descriptions containing egocentric (“left/right”) or allocentric (cardinal) relational terms, while they also intentionally maintain an imagined egocentric or allocentric viewpoint. By testing participants’ spatial knowledge either in an allocentric (Experiments 1-3) or in an egocentric task (Experiments 4 and 5) this research exploits the facilitation produced by encoding-test congruence to clarify the contribution of mental imagery during spatial language processing and spatial tasks. Additionally, Experiments 1-3 adopted an eye-tracking methodology to study the allocation of attention to landmarks in descriptions and sketch maps as a function of linguistic reference frame and imagined perspective, while also recording subjective self-reports of participants’ phenomenal experiences. Key findings include evidence that egocentric and allocentric relational terms may not map directly onto egocentric and allocentric imagined perspectives, calling into question a common assumptions of psycholinguistic studies of spatial language. A novel way to establish experimental control over mental representations is presented, together with evidence that specific eye gaze patterns on landmark words or landmark regions of maps can be diagnostic of different imagined spatial perspectives. Experiments 4 and 5 adopted the same key manipulations to the study of spatial updating and bearing estimation following encoding of short, aurally-presented route descriptions. By employing two different response modes in this triangle completion task, Experiments 4 and 5 attempted to address key issues of experimental control that may have caused the conflicting results found in the literature on spatial updating during mental navigation and visuospatial imagery. The impact of encoding manipulations and of differences in response modality on embodiment and task performance were explored. Experiments 6-8 subsequently attempted to determine the developmental trajectory for the ability to discriminate between navigationally salient and non-salient landmarks, and to translate spatial relations between different reference frames. In these developmental studies, children and young adolescents were presented with videos portraying journeys through virtual environments from an egocentric perspective, and tested their ability to translate the resulting representations in order to perform allocentric spatial tasks. No clear facilitation effect of decision-point landmarks was observed or any strong indication that salient navigational features are more strongly represented in memory within the age range we tested (four to 11 years of age). Possible reasons for this are discussed in light of the relevant literature and methodological differences. Globally, the results presented indicate a functional role of imagery during language processing, pointing to the importance of introspection and accurate task analyses when interpreting behavioural results. Additionally, the study of implicit measures of attention such as eye tracking measures has the potential to improve our understanding mental representations, and of how they mediate between perception, action, and language. Lastly, these results also suggest that synergy between seemingly distinct research areas may be key in better characterising the nature of mental imagery in its different forms, and that the phenomenology of imagery content will be an essential part of this and future research