The eye-mind link postulates a relationship between overt attention and covert cognitive processes. Eye movements are the key measure used to reflect attention allocation, and have long been used to develop explanatory and predictive models of mental processing. However, there is very little research investigating the direct relationship between eye movements and the processing occurring in the brain. The proposed research aims to leverage a multimodal dataset where both eye tracking and the cortical hemodynamic responses in the brain were recorded in parallel. The goal is to develop a flexible methodology that can relate eye movements to the brain activations occurring in parallel, including state-of-the-art transformer models to extract meaningful information from the two very different time series. The goal is to support the understanding of the eye-mind link through a focus on the "mind" while also working towards multimodal modeling of cognitive processes.

Eye movements have long been used to reflect ongoing cognitive processing to develop explanatory and predictive models of mental states and processes. This relationship, deemed the eye-mind link, contains underlying assumptions of the mental processes occurring in the brain, which have rarely been explicitly investigated. We propose a multimodal approach to investigate alignment of eye movements and brain activations (eye-brain alignment) and how it might be predicted by unfolding cognitive processes. We applied this method to a dataset of 76 participants who read long, connected texts while their eye movements and the hemodynamic responses in their brains were tracked using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found that reliable eye-brain alignment signals varied based on the participants’ cognitive state during reading. Implications for multimodal modeling of cognitive processes are discussed.

We examined associations between mind wandering – where attention shifts from the task at hand to task-unrelated thoughts – and learning outcomes. Our data consisted of 177 students who self-reported mind wandering while reading five long, connected texts on scientific research methods and completed learning assessments targeting multiple depths of processing (rote, inference, integration) at different timescales (during and after reading each text, after reading all texts, and after a week-long delay). We found that mind wandering negatively predicted measures of factual, text-based (explicit) information and global integration of information across multiple parts of the text, but not measures requiring a local inference on a single sentence. Further, mind wandering only predicted comprehension measures assessed during the reading session and not after a week-long delay. Our findings provide important nuances to the established negative link between mind wandering and learning outcomes, which has predominantly focused on rote comprehension assessed during the learning session itself. Implications for interventions to address mind wandering during learning are discussed.

Much emphasis has been placed on how the affordances and layouts of an office setting can influence co-worker interactions and perceived team outcomes. Little is known, however, whether perceptions of teamwork and team conflict are affected when the location of work changes from the office to the home. To address this gap, we present findings from a ten-week,in situ study of 91 information workers from 27 US-based teams. We compare three distinct work locations---private and shared workspaces at home as well at the office---and explore how each location may impact individual perceptions of teamwork. While there was no significant association with participants' perceptions of teamwork, results revealed associations of work location with team conflict: participants who worked in a private room at home reported significantly lower team conflict compared to those working in the office. No difference was found for the office and the shared workspace. We further found that the influence of work location on team conflict interacted with job decision latitude and the level of task interdependence among co-workers. We discuss practical implications for full-time work from home (WFH) on teams. Our study adds an important environmental dimension to the literature on remote teaming, which in turn may help organizations as they consider, prepare, or implement more permanent WFH and/or hybrid work policies in the future.

Working remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant shifts and disruptions in the personal and work lives of millions of information workers and their teams. We examined how sleep patterns---an important component of mental and physical health---relates to teamwork. We used wearable sensing and daily questionnaires to examine sleep patterns, affect, and perceptions of teamwork in 71 information workers from 22 teams over a ten-week period. Participants reported delays in sleep onset and offset as well as longer sleep duration during the pandemic. A similar shift was found in work schedules, though total work hours did not change significantly. Surprisingly, we found that more sleep was negatively related to positive affect, perceptions of teamwork, and perceptions of team productivity. However, a greater misalignment in the sleep patterns of members in a team predicted positive affect and teamwork after accounting for individual differences in sleep preferences. A follow-up analysis of exit interviews with participants revealed team-working conventions and collaborative mindsets as prominent themes that might help explain some of the ways that misalignment in sleep can affect teamwork. We discuss implications of sleep and sleep misalignment in work-from-home contexts with an eye towards leveraging sleep data to facilitate remote teamwork.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of previously co-located information workers had to work from home, a trend expected to become much more commonplace in the future. We interviewed 53 information workers from 17 U.S. teams to understand how this unique extended work-from-home setting influenced teamwork and how they adapted to it. Using a grounded theory approach, we discovered that extended remote work highlighted diversity in team members' home-lives and daily work rhythms. Whereas these types of diversity played only marginal roles for teams in the co-located office, they had a more tangible impact in the work-from-home setting, from coordination delays and interruptions to conflicts related to workload fairness, miscommunication, and trust. Importantly, workers reported that their teams adapted to these challenges by setting explicit norms and standards for online communication and asynchronous collaboration and by promoting general social and situational awareness. We discuss computer-supported designs to help teams manage these latent diversities in an extended remote teamwork setting.