Gaze-Aware Cognitive Assistant for Multiscreen Surveillance

Surveillance operators must scan multiple camera feeds to ensure timely detection of incidents; however, variability in scanning behavior can lead to untimely/failed detection of critical information in feeds that were neglected for a long period. Us-ing an eye tracker to monitor screen fixations we can calculate (in real-time) the time elapsed since the last scan of each particular feed, allowing the setting-up of targeted countermeasures contingent on operator oculomotor behavior. One ave-nue is to provide operators with timely alerts to modulate the scan pattern to avoid attentional tunneling and inattentional blindness. We test such an adaptive solution within a major event surveillance simulation and preliminary results show that operator scan behavior can be modulated, although further investigation is re-quired to determine warning frequency and modality to optimize the balance be-tween saliency and workload increase. Future work will focus on adding a real-time vigilance detection and countermeasure capability

Semantic Priming by Task-Irrelevant Speech: Category-Level or Item-Level Processing?

Recent studies show that task-irrelevant speech affects subsequent behaviour. For instance, category-exemplar production is primed if those exemplars were previously auditory distractors that accompanied the presentation of visual digits for serial recall (Röer et al., 2017). This study examines semantic organization as a boundary condition for the semantic priming effect. In a between-participants design, sequences of auditory distractors were either semantically organized (eight exemplars from one category) or random (one exemplar from each of eight categories). Semantic priming was measured by comparing production probability of previously encountered words against a matched unencountered set. Prior research indicates that an unexpected categorical change in task-irrelevant speech disrupts performance, suggesting processing of shared categorical membership enhances semantic priming (e.g., Vachon et al., 2020). Consistent with these findings, semantic priming was found when distractor words were semantically organized but was absent with randomly presented exemplars, offering insight into the semantic processing of background sound

Warning – Taboo Words Ahead! Avoiding Attentional Capture by Spoken Taboo Distractors

Task-irrelevant sound disrupts serial short-term memory (STM). On the interference-by-process account, order cues arising from the automatic pre-categorical processing of changes in the sound conflicts with serial–order processing used for the memory task. It has been argued that post-categorical auditory distraction effects in serial STM—such as from spoken taboo words—are therefore problematic for this account. However, we test the view that the taboo-distractor effect, like other post-categorical distraction effects, is due to a distinct, attentional diversion, mechanism: We examine whether it is, unlike effects attributable to interference-by-process, amenable to top-down control. In Experiment 1, disruption of serial recall by taboo words was greater than that by neutral words as well as by words independently rated as more valent (but less taboo), suggesting that the taboo-word effect is not simply a valence effect. Neither the effect of taboo nor valence, however, was attenuated under high focal-task encoding load, which is thought to promote top-down control. However, in Experiment 2, foreknowledge of the distractors did eliminate the taboo-distractor effect while having no effect on disruption by neutral words. In conclusion, the taboo-distractor effect results from a controllable attentional-diversion mechanism distinct from that underpinning the effect of any acoustically-changing sound