Abstract
In recent years, natural viewing settings with video presentation have been used in neurological and psychological experiments. However, the experienced cognitive load may differ among participants. In this study, we show that rapid serial blinks (RSB) can indicate temporally increased cognitive load with high temporal resolution. We proposed a method to create a personal criterion for respective participants by using empirical blink intervals. When we focused on more than four serial blinks (i.e., three inter-blink intervals), an increased number of RSB detect participants who felt hard to understanding, indicating a poor understanding of the subject matter. By contrast, a constant criterion across participants used in previous study could not detect participant’s understanding. These results suggest that individual differences in cognitive trait of each participant may skew the results of experiments. To avoid biases, we recommend researchers to perform an operational check on individually different temporally increased cognitive loads among experimental groups.
Highlights
In the field of neurology and psychology, researchers often used controlled experimental settings
We show that rapid serial blinks (RSB) in natural viewing settings can indicate temporally increased cognitive load with high temporal resolution and low calculation costs
When we focused on more than four blinks, the number of RSB increased for lesser understanding participants watching the differentiation video, while no group difference was found when watching the multiplication video
Summary
In the field of neurology and psychology, researchers often used controlled experimental settings. These researches have provided important findings on neural basis and behavioral tendencies, the stimuli used in those experiments were simple for exploring perception or judgment in more complicated situations where we usually meet in real life. Natural viewing setting paradigm has been proposed as an alternative method [1,2,3,4,5], providing findings on cognitive activities in more context-dependent environments. Stimulus values may vary participant to participants in natural viewing settings. We must consider the differences of participants’ experience during watching the stimulus video. In the cases the experimental procedures include cognitive decisions, it is necessary for researchers to adequately control each participant’ cognitive load in the subsequent analysis
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