Study and Detection of Mindless Reading

Mind-wandering refers to a phenomenon of having thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Its occurrences have been documented across different activities in both experimentally controlled and real-life situations. Furthermore, evidence suggests that one’s mind may start to wander at will and in moments when we preferred it did not. Indeed, mind-wandering has been linked to deterioration of performance in a number of activities. One example is compromised text comprehension: Experiencing mind-wandering episodes is unconducive to efficient reading. One way we could hope to attenuate the negative influence of mind-wandering on performance is to recognize it and avoid it. However, because one may not be aware that their mind has wandered, we need to rely on external means of discovering mind-wandering. Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art methods of detecting mind-wandering are imprecise and impractical. In this dissertation, I attempt to ameliorate some of these methodological deficiencies by developing an alternative, a completely unobtrusive way of detecting mindless reading (i.e., mind-wandering during reading). The ability to read is the sine qua non of daily life in literate societies and has been studied for over 40 years. However, mindless reading literature is far less voluminous. Because of that, I approach mindless reading detection by first systematically studying mindless reading itself thus expanding our understanding of this still nebulous cognitive phenomenon. Eye movements play a central role in this work. Interestingly, even though text comprehension may cease entirely during mindless reading, eyes of mindless readers move remarkably similar to those of mindful readers. Despite that, my results suggest that eye movements can be used to successfully disentangle these two modes of reading

Distributed Framework for Adaptive Explanatory Visualization

AbstractEducational tools designed to help students understand programming paradigms and learn programming languages are an important component of many academic curricula. This paper presents the architecture of a distributed event-based visualization system. We describe specialized content provision and visualization services and present two communication protocols in an attempt to explore the possibility of a standardized language

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