Performance on tasks of visuospatial memory and ability: A cross-sectional study in 330 adolescents aged 11 to 20

Cognitive functions mature at different points in time between birth and adulthood. Of these functions, visuospatial skills, such as spatial memory and part-to-whole organization, have often been tested in children and adults but have been less frequently evaluated during adolescence. We studied visuospatial memory and ability during this critical developmental period, as well as the correlation between these abilities, in a large group of 330 participants (aged 11 to 20 year

Developmental changes in visual search are determined by changing visuospatial abilities and task repetition: a longitudinal study in adolescents

Using a longitudinal study design, a group of 94 adolescents participated in a visual search task and a visuospatial ability task yearly for four consecutive years. We analyzed the association between changes in visuospatial ability and changes in visual search performance and behavior and estimated additional effects of age and task repetition. Visuospatial ability was measured with the Design Organization Test (DOT). Search performance was analyzed in terms of reaction time and response accuracy. Search behavior was analyzed in terms of the number of fixations per trial, the saccade amplitude, and the distribution of fixations over different types of elements. We found that both the increase in age and the yearly repetition of the DOT had a positive effect on visuospatial ability. We show that the acceleration of visual search during childhood can be explained by the increase in visuospatial abilities with age during adolescence. With the yearly task repetition, visual search became faster and more accurate, while fewer fixations were made with larger saccade amplitudes. The combination of increasing visuospatial ability and task repetition makes visual search more effective and might increase the performance of many daily tasks during adolescence

Visual search accelerates during adolescence

We studied changes in visual-search performance and behavior during adolescence. Search performance was analyzed in terms of reaction time and response accuracy. Search behavior was analyzed in terms of the objects fixated and the duration of these fixations. A large group of adolescents (N = 140; age: 12-19 years; 47% female, 53% male) participated in a visual-search experiment in which their eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker. The experiment consisted of 144 trials (50% with a target present), and participants had to decide whether a target was present. Each trial showed a search display with 36 Gabor patches placed on a hexagonal grid. The target was a vertically oriented element with a high spatial frequency. Nontargets differed from the target in spatial frequency, orientation, or both. Search performance and behavior changed during adolescence; with increasing age, fixation duration and reaction time decreased. Response accuracy, number of fixations, and selection of elements to fixate upon did not change with age. Thus, the speed of foveal discrimination increases with age, while the efficiency of peripheral selection does not change. We conclude that the way visual information is gathered does not change during adolescence, but the processing of visual information becomes faster

User-adaptive explanatory program visualization: Evaluation and insights from eye movements

User-adaptive visualization and explanatory visualization have been suggested to increase educational effectiveness of program visualization. This paper presents an attempt to assess the value of these two approaches. The results of a controlled experiment indicate that explanatory visualization allows students to substantially increase the understanding of a new programming topic. Furthermore, an educational application that features explanatory visualization and employs a user model to track users' progress allows students to interact with a larger amount of material than an application which does not follow users' activity. However, no support for the difference in short-term knowledge gain between the two applications is found. Nevertheless, students admit that they prefer the version that estimates and visualizes their progress and adapts the learning content to their level of understanding. They also use the application's estimation to pace their work. The differences in eye movement patterns between the applications employing adaptive and non-adaptive explanatory visualizations are investigated as well. Gaze-based measures show that adaptive visualization captivates attention more than its non-personalized counterpart and is more interesting to students. Natural language explanations also accumulate a big portion of students' attention. Furthermore, the results indicate that working memory span can mediate the perception of adaptation. It is possible that user-adaptation in an educational context provides a different service to people with different mental processing capabilities. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010