The Effects of Cognitive Load, Social Objects, Non-social Objects and Adhd-like Traits on Visual Attention

The current thesis examines the effects of cognitive load, social object, non-social object and ADHD-like traits on visual attention. This thesis reports (Experiment 1 and 2) a modified version of Lavie et al, (2004; 2005) and confirmed that increased memory load disrupted performance in the classic flanker task, but not in the singleton. Experiment 3 uses the same manipulation of WM load to probe attention during the viewing of complex scenes. Experiment 4 and 5 examine the effects of visuospatial WM on different presentations: sequential and simultaneous. These experiments compare the extent to which increasing WM load would change the pattern of viewing of the physically salient and socially salient objects while also investigating differences in ADHD traits. Experiment 6 examines the effects of instructions on the image-viewing task by restricting areas such as: social and non-social. Experiments 7 and 8 examine the effects of occluding the eyes in a conversation in traits of ADHD and ASD (low vs high). Experiments 9 examines the relationship between working memory components (maintenance and distractor processing) and ADHD traits within the general population. This thesis discusses their results based on visual prioritisations (social, high and low salience), cognitive load and the heterogeneity of ADHD and their comorbidities. Taken together these results provide interesting implications in eye movements behaviour, in the understanding of individual differences and in the underlying cognitive abilities

A Monitoring Infrastructure for the Quality Assessment of Cloud Services

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) specify the strict terms under which cloud services must be provided. The assessment of the quality of services being provided is critical for both clients and service providers. In this context, stakeholders must be capable of monitoring services delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) at runtime and of reporting any eventual non-compliance with SLAs in a comprehensive and flexible manner. In this paper, we present the definition of an SLA compliance monitoring infrastructure, which is based on the use of [email protected], its main components and artifacts, and the interactions among them. We place emphasis on the configuration of the artifacts that will enable the monitoring, and we present a prototype that can be used to perform this monitoring. The feasibility of our proposal is illustrated by means of a case study, which shows the use of the components and artifacts in the infrastructure and the configuration of a specific plan with which to monitor the services deployed on the Microsoft Azure© platform

Social prioritisation in scene viewing and the effects of a spatial memory load

When free-viewing scenes, participants tend to preferentially fixate social elements (e.g., people). In the present study, we tested whether this bias would be disrupted by increasing the demands of a secondary dual-task: holding a set of (one or six) spatial locations in memory, presented either simultaneously or sequentially. Following a retention interval, participants judged whether a test location was present in the to-be-remembered stimuli. During the retention interval participants free-viewed scenes containing a social element (a person) and a non-social element (an object) that served as regions of interest. In order to assess the impact of physical salience, the non-social element was presented in both an unaltered baseline version, and in a version where its salience was artificially increased. The results showed that the preference to look at social elements decreased when the demands of the spatial memory task were increased from one to six locations, regardless of presentation mode (simultaneous or sequential). The high-load condition also resulted in more central fixations and reduced exploration of the scene. The results indicate that the social prioritisation effect, and scene viewing more generally, can be affected by a concurrent memory load

Do cognitive load and ADHD traits affect the tendency to prioritise social information in scenes?

We report two experiments investigating the effect of working memory (WM) load on selective attention. Experiment 1 was a modified version of Lavie et al. and confirmed that increasing memory load disrupted performance in the classic flanker task. Experiment 2 used the same manipulation of WM load to probe attention during the viewing of complex scenes while also investigating individual differences in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits. In the image-viewing task, we measured the degree to which fixations targeted each of two crucial objects: (1) a social object (a person in the scene) and (2) a non-social object of higher or lower physical salience. We compared the extent to which increasing WM load would change the pattern of viewing of the physically salient and socially salient objects. If attending to the social item requires greater default voluntary top-down resources, then the viewing of social objects should show stronger modulation by WM load compared with viewing of physically salient objects. The results showed that the social object was fixated to a greater degree than the other object (regardless of physical salience). Increased salience drew fixations away from the background leading to slightly increased fixations on the non-social object, without changing fixations on the social object. Increased levels of ADHD-like traits were associated with fewer fixations on the social object, but only in the high-salient, low-load condition. Importantly, WM load did not affect the number of fixations on the social object. Such findings suggest rather surprisingly that attending to a social area in complex stimuli is not dependent on the availability of voluntary top-down resources

A Complete Pipeline for Heart Rate Extraction from Infant ECGs

We would like to express our gratitude to all the families who dedicated their time to donate data to the study. The authors would also like to thank Nicoleta Gavrila, Lauren Charters, Aastha Mishra, Emily Clayton, and Brigita Ceponyte for their additional help in the data collection, and David Mullineaux for his help in verifying the code used in the project.Peer reviewe

EgoActive: Integrated wireless wearable sensors for capturing infant egocentric auditory-visual statistics and autonomic nervous system function ‘in the wild’

There have been sustained efforts toward using naturalistic methods in developmental science to measure infant behaviors in the real world from an egocentric perspective because statistical regularities in the environment can shape and be shaped by the developing infant. However, there is no user-friendly and unobtrusive technology to densely and reliably sample life in the wild. To address this gap, we present the design, implementation and validation of the EgoActive platform, which addresses limitations of existing wearable technologies for developmental research. EgoActive records the active infants’ egocentric perspective of the world via a miniature wireless head-mounted camera concurrently with their physiological responses to this input via a lightweight, wireless ECG/acceleration sensor. We also provide software tools to facilitate data analyses. Our validation studies showed that the cameras and body sensors performed well. Families also reported that the platform was comfortable, easy to use and operate, and did not interfere with daily activities. The synchronized multi-modal data from the EgoActive platform can help tease apart complex processes that are important for child development to further our understanding of areas ranging from executive function to emotion processing and social learning

Los avatares del cuerpo en la constitución de la identidad

Las identidades de género se apoyan en un trabajo diario de ritualización corporal; este proceso es leído a través de dos conceptos: las técnicas corporales de Marcel Mauss, las cuales aluden al entrenamiento de los cuerpos, aquí, en relación al imaginario de la masculinidad y la feminidad y las expectativas que engendra; y, el concepto de habitus de Pierre Bourdieu, que apunta a la comprensión de disposiciones diferenciadas entre hombres y mujeres, al suponer la encarnación de las técnicas de las que habla Mauss. Esto se ejemplifica a partir de las identidades radicales y la actuación del drag king