The present longitudinal quasi-experimental study examined the extent to which music education is related to the development of attentional control. Control of visual attention was examined with the use of an antisaccade task in an eye tracking study. Fifty primary school children (6–7 years old), 25 from music school matched on fluid intelligence with their peers from non-music primary school, performed the antisaccade task three times, at the beginning of school education, after 12 and 24 months. Their eye movements were recorded each time. Over time, attentional control increased in both groups. Music school children performed significantly better than general school children in antisaccadic trials. In line with the prediction, all students’ correct responses in the antisaccade task were faster over the time of education, supporting growth in their ability of attentional control. Yet this growth was significantly greater in music school children. Only music school children significantly decrease the latency of saccades toward the target in the correct antisaccade trials. No such trend was significant for children without music education. Finally, fluid intelligence increased over time in both groups. The present study demonstrated a relationship between systematic music education for the development of children’s attentional control.

The paper presents empirical evidence in how differently art history experts and non-experts scan images of architectural objects. The study is a work-in-progress on a ubiquitous system enhancing accessibility to architectural heritage for a broad audience with a special focus on the Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI). The system provides city navigation for BVI along with the location-based real-time information and Gaze-Led Audio Descriptions (GLAD) about architectural artefacts. Gaze visualizations of non-experts are used to guide professional audio describers in shaping more natural, gaze-led narratives.

The paper contributes to scanpath bundling methods. We propose an analytical approach for statistical comparisons of aggregated scanpath visualizations by means of second-order gaze analysis metrics. The present study explores differences in attention distribution and cognitive processing over architectural objects between architects, art historians, and non-experts. The results show between-group differences in attention dynamics of the aggregated scanpaths. The aggregated scanpaths of both expert groups were focal, while non-experts' scanpaths were ambient. Experts also paid more attention to and tended to remember better the architectural details and their location. The discussion explores the scalability of the proposed approach for Human-Computer Interaction and accessibility technologies designed to enhance the experience of cultural heritage.

This article examines the attentional mechanism of in-person collaboration by means of System Dynamics-based simulations using an eye tracking experiment. Three experimental conditions were tested: in-person collaboration, remote collaboration, and single user. We hypothesized that collaboration focuses users’ attention on key information facilitating decision-making. Collaborating participants dwelt longer on key elements of the simulation than single users. Moreover, in-person collaboration and single users yielded a strategy of decision-making similar to an optimal strategy. Finally, in-person collaboration was less cognitively demanding and of higher quality. The contribution of this article is a deeper understanding of how in-person collaboration on a large display can help users focus their visual attention on the most important areas. With this novel understanding, we believe collaborative systems designers will be better equipped to design more effective attention-guiding mechanisms in remote collaboration systems. The present work has the potential to advance the study of collaborative, interactive technologies.

We compare the measurement error and validity of webcam-based eye tracking to that of a remote eye tracker as well as software integration of both. We ran a study with n = 83 participants, consisting of a point detection task and an emotional visual search task under three between-subjects experimental conditions (webcam-based, remote, and integrated). We analyzed location-based (e.g., fixations) and process-based eye tracking metrics (ambient-focal attention dynamics). Despite higher measurement error of webcam eye tracking, our results in all three experimental conditions were in line with theoretical expectations. For example, time to first fixation toward happy faces was significantly shorter than toward sad faces (the happiness-superiority effect). As expected, we also observed the switch from ambient to focal attention depending on complexity of the visual stimuli. We conclude that webcam-based eye tracking is a viable, low-cost alternative to remote eye tracking.

This paper demonstrates the utility of ambient-focal attention and pupil dilation dynamics to describe visual processing of emotional facial expressions. Pupil dilation and focal eye movements reflect deeper cognitive processing and thus shed more light on the dynamics of emotional expression recognition. Socially anxious individuals (N = 24) and non-anxious controls (N = 24) were asked to recognize emotional facial expressions that gradually morphed from a neutral expression to one of happiness, sadness, or anger in 10-sec animations. Anxious cohorts exhibited more ambient face scanning than their non-anxious counterparts. We observed a positive relationship between focal fixations and pupil dilation, indicating deeper processing of viewed faces, but only by non-anxious participants, and only during the last phase of emotion recognition. Group differences in the dynamics of ambient-focal attention support the hypothesis of vigilance to emotional expression processing by socially anxious individuals. We discuss the results by referring to current literature on cognitive psychopathology.