Dynamic Mental Representations Research Articles

“Context-Dependent Cognitive Workload Monitoring using Pupillometry for Control Room Operators to Prevent Overload”

Occupational Application Modernization of process plants has replaced traditional machine control with sophisticated computerized control, with the work required of control room operators changing from predominantly physical to cognitive. As a result, excessive cognitive workload during an abnormal condition is not an uncommon situation. Almost 70% of accidents in process industries are the result of human error, which is largely modulated by high cognitive workload. A context-dependent methodology using pupillometry was adopted in this study for workload assessment. We found that workload has a significant effect on task performance and subsequent success in handling an abnormal condition. Incorporating contextual information along with pupillometry-based measures was useful to explore the dynamics of variations in workload in depth. In addition, the proposed methodology is a more reliable method for a dynamic environment in which the situation evolves with operator interactions with the process. Technical : Background: Operator workload monitoring has become an important aspect of system engineering due to ever increasing cognitive demands in the control room. Higher cognitive workload, beyond capability, is directly associated with human error in plant operations. Even a small increase in workload during peak demand may result in human error, which can endanger the safety of a process plant. Purpose: Subjective methods are of limited use due to the requirement for near real-time evaluation of cognitive workload. Applications such as process plant control room require the operator to reiterate and re-represent the situation based on the contextual cues from environment. Hence, our objective was to develop and test a methodology that incorporates contextual information in workload measurement using pupillometry. Method: Participants (n = 44) performed simulated process control tasks. Pupil size was recorded using an eye-tracking device. Recorded pupil size was analyzed based on a methodology that incorporates contextual information from the human-machine interface. Events that present new information about the current state of the process were categorized as critical events. Pupil size variation was adopted to provide an estimate of cognitive workload between consecutive critical events. Results: Cognitive workload was associated with process behavior and operator actions. An increase in cognitive workload for specific events was observed when participant actions deteriorated process conditions. We also observed that overall task performance was associated with the frequency of certain events and corresponding variations in pupillary behavior. Conclusion: Incorporating contextual information provides more detailed insights into the dynamics of variations in cognitive workload. The mental representation of a current situation may vary depending on expertise level. The proposed methodology assesses such dynamic mental representations in the form of frequency of critical events and corresponding changes in the cognitive workload that ultimately determines the likelihood of an operator successfully completing a task.

The influence of auditory rhythms on the speed of inferred motion.

The present research explored the influence of isochronous auditory rhythms on the timing of movement-related prediction in two experiments. In both experiments, participants observed a moving disc that was visible for a predetermined period before disappearing behind a small, medium, or large occluded area for the remainder of its movement. In Experiment 1, the disc was visible for 1 s. During this period, participants were exposed to either a fast or slow auditory rhythm, or they heard nothing. They were instructed to press a key to indicate when they believed the moving disc had reached a specified location on the other side of the occluded area. The procedure measured the (signed) error in participants' estimate of the time it would take for a moving object to contact a stationary one. The principal results of Experiment 1 were main effects of the rate of the auditory rhythm and of the size of the occlusion on participants' judgments. In Experiment 2, the period of visibility was varied with size of the occlusion area to keep the total movement time constant for all three levels of occlusion. The results replicated the main effect of rhythm found in Experiment 1 and showed a small, significant interaction, but indicated no main effect of occlusion size. Overall, the results indicate that exposure to fast isochronous auditory rhythms during an interval of inferred motion can influence the imagined rate of such motion and suggest a possible role of an internal rhythmicity in the maintenance of temporally accurate dynamic mental representations.

Dynamic mental representations of habitual behaviours: Food choice on a web-based environment

AimRather than being rigid, habitual behaviours may be determined by dynamic mental representations that can adapt to context changes. This adaptive potential may result from particular conditions dependent on the interaction between two sources of mental constructs activation: perceived context applicability and cognitive accessibility.MethodTwo web-shopping simulations offering the choice between habitually chosen and non-habitually chosen food products were presented to participants. This considered two choice contexts differing in the habitual behaviour perceived applicability (low vs. high) and a measure of habitual behaviour chronicity.ResultsStudy 1 demonstrated a perceived applicability effect, with more habitual (non-organic) than non-habitual (organic) food products chosen in a high perceived applicability (familiar) than in a low perceived applicability (new) context. The adaptive potential of habitual behaviour was evident in the habitual products choice consistency across three successive choices, despite the decrease in perceived applicability. Study 2 evidenced the adaptive potential in strong habitual behaviour participants – high chronic accessibility – who chose a habitual product (milk) more than a non-habitual product (orange juice), even when perceived applicability was reduced (new context).ConclusionResults portray consumers as adaptive decision makers that can flexibly cope with changes in their (inner and outer) choice contexts.

Patterns of Play Activities in Autism and Typical Development. A Case Study

Objects propose us a variety of action possibilities (affordances). The individual's experiences, motivation and object properties also influence the way of object use. Conventional (proper) and nonconventional (flexible, idiosyncretic) object use is very much part of normal development. However, little detailed attention has been paid so far to object use in typical and atypical development. The aim of my study was to explore the differences of object play between two preschool children. One of them lives with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), while the other boy is a mentally age-matched child with typical development (TD). Object play was recorded in semi-structured situations by child-parent dyads, in their homes. Three sets of objects were introduced and offered for play by the parent. For the analysis of the video records I used the Observer XT 8.0 software. Two independent coders coded actions types. The TD-child generally preferred creative play with the objects offered by the mother. The mother's demonstration and her short instructions were enough to facilitate her son's play activity. In contrast, the autistic boy's attention was narrow and this child needed more explicit information about the tools to interpret their context. It is remarkable that the ASD-child expressed a desire to use pictures during the play activity. The TD-child's spontaneous play reflected more practical and flexible knowledge about the surrounding world (existence of dynamic mental representations), while the autistic child rather requested single pictures (simpler and static information for cognition) by sets. Further researches are needed to investigate how to use pictures exactly to stimulate play movements to develop autistic children's skills and support their socialization and integration into the society.

EPA-1194 – Comparative study of static and dynamic family representations in psychosomatic families. case study

A well-functioning family system is able to change over time, while a dysfunctional one rigidly insists on its behaviour patterns well accustomed to. Thus all the family members become essential parts of this unfavourable condition. The aim of our study was to explore the psychosomatic family members’ static and dynamic mental representations about their family. There were altogether three families in our study, one of them with an asthmatic person and the other one with a young adult with panic disorder. The members of the third family were healthy people. Gehring's (2010) Family System Test (FAST) - a figural technique - was used to explore the individuals’ family representations. Later the dynamic form of the test was also applied. The results showed more rigid family structure in the cases of the psychosomatic patients. While the family members’ static representations were more comparable in the typical and ideal situations in the family with an asthmatic young person, the panic patient's typical and conflict family representations demonstrated more similarity. In addition, this representation rather reflected the healthy family members’ mental representation in the family with a panic patient, while in the other case the joint representation of the family members was influenced by the asthmatic young man to a greater extent. The observed types of the family structure confirm the different static representations and cognitive processes by the family members, which raises the significance of the effect of the analysed psychosomatic disorders on the given family system.

Dynamic Simulation of Emotion in Language Comprehension

The major view of Barsalou's perceptual symbol system, a new theory about knowledge representation, is that perceptual symbol is a component of cognition. Up till now, the theory has been put into wide application and obtained much support in experimental studies of language comprehension. Based on this theory, Zwaan proposed the Immersed Experiencer Frame (IEF), which assumed that the comprehender was an immersed experiencer of the described situation and comprehension was the vicarious experience of the described events. Hence, dynamic mental representation of human emotion can be seen as a result of tracing and simulating the emotional experience on the basis of reading comprehension. This research adopted mixed experimental design and sentence-pictures match paradigm. It used such sentences containing static and dynamic emotional information as experimental materials. The response latency of picture judgment was collected as the dependent variable. Different settings of temporal intervals and experimental procedures were employed to explore the participants' mental representation and time proceedings for comprehension of static and dynamic emotions progression. The research results suggest (1) Participants are able to mentally simulate the emotional information during language comprehension, and emotional context will highly activate their experiential simulation. (2)The representation for static emotion can be finished at the earlier period of language comprehension. Once formed, it becomes highly stable and enduring. (3) Participants are able to mentally simulate the dynamic emotion, which takes a greater amount of time and is finished at the later period of comprehension. The representation for the sentences involving emotional alternations is influenced by the former emotional state. To be more specific, participants will stick to the previous negative emotion and it is not easy for them to represent the positive emotion when reading the sentences involving a transformation from the negative emotional state to the positive state.

A step at a time: Preliterate children’s simulation of narrative movement during story comprehension

A growing body of work suggests that narrative comprehension involves the simulation of the described events and actions (e.g., Barsalou, 2008; Matlock, 2004). Preliterate children’s ability to simulate a narrative character’s movements is explored here in three studies. Children’s simulations of a character’s movements were found to be constrained by their expectation of the duration of the described activities (i.e., walking vs. driving) and by their expectations about the motivating influence of certain psychological factors (i.e., character being eager or not eager to get to a location). These findings reveal an ability among preliterate children to create impressively rich and dynamic mental representations of narrative events and address, with a novel methodology, an identified need for greater exploration of precursors to narrative comprehension.

Dynamic Mental Representations in Language Comprehension

Previous research has suggested that language comprehension routinely involves dynamic mental representations. Mental representations of temporal information about successive events stored in memory were investigated. Three experiments were conducted using a sentence-probe-recognition task in which the sentence events and the probe events were designed to reflect either a chronological time orientation or a reversed time orientation. The implicit time shift between events also was manipulated. Chronological events were more accessible than the reversed-time events, even for events involving a scenario shift. However, when the sentence events and the probe events differed by level within a hierarchical structure, the effect of temporal orientation disappeared. The results suggest that readers continue to track mentally an event's temporal structure and anticipate the upcoming event in a dynamic representation until another event emerges on a different level within a hierarchical structure.

Vestibular syndrome: A change in internal spatial representation

The vestibular system contributes to a wide range of functions from reflexes to spatial representation. This paper reviews behavioral, perceptive, and cognitive data that highlight the role of changes in internal spatial representation on the vestibular syndrome. Firstly, we review how visual vertical perception and postural orientation depend on multiple reference frames and multisensory integration and how reference frames are selected according to the status of the peripheral vestibular system (i.e., unilateral or bilateral hyporeflexia), the environmental constraints (i.e., sensory cues), and the postural constraints (i.e., balance control). We show how changes in reference frames are able to modify vestibular lesion-induced postural and locomotor deficits and propose that fast changes in reference frame may be considered as fast-adaptive processes after vestibular loss. Secondly, we review data dealing with the influence of vestibular loss on higher levels of internal representation sustaining spatial orientation and navigation. Particular emphasis is placed on spatial performance according to task complexity (i.e., the required level of spatial knowledge) and to the sensory cues available to define the position and orientation within the environment (i.e., real navigation in darkness or visual virtual navigation without any actual self-motion). We suggest that vestibular signals are necessary for other sensory cues to be properly integrated and that vestibular cues are involved in extrapersonal space representation. In this respect, vestibular-induced changes would be based on a dynamic mental representation of space that is continuously updated and that supports fast-adaptive processes.

Implications of the mental models approach for cultivation theory

Mental models are dynamic mental representations of situations, events, and objects. We argue that the mental models approach can expand our understanding of cultivation theory. We survey the research on mental models, situation models including the event indexing model, and cultural models. Based on this literature, we propose several ways in which cultivation theory can be expanded to provide a richer understanding of how the media influence peoples perception of their social reality and understanding of their culture.

Representational momentum, internalized dynamics, and perceptual adaptation

In this paper I look at dynamic mental representations, motion detection under conditions of certainty or uncertainty, perceptual adaptation, and priming of motion direction. The goal is to bridge the boundaries created in part by the use of different terminology within different literatures. The most fruitful parallel may be between the phenomenon of dynamic mental representation and representational momentum on the one hand, and perceptual adaptation as revealed by motion priming on the other. I suggest an overlap between the two phenomena.

Dynamic mental representation in infancy

Recent research indicates that 4- to 8-month-old infants can track and anticipate the final orientation of an object following different invisible spatial transformations (Rochat, P., Hespos, S.J. (1996). Cognitive Development, 11, 3–17). Six experiments were designed to specify further the nature and development of early expectation for a set of dynamic events. A violation of expectation method was used to assess infants' reactions to probable and improbable outcomes of an objects' orientation following an invisible transformation. The availability of orientation cues, the path of motion, and the amount of invisible spatial transformation was systematically varied. The studies indicate that infants as young as 4 months of age detect orientation-specific cues for objects undergoing invisible spatial transformations. Developmental differences in this ability between 4 and 6 months of age lend insight to the nature and limitations of this early representational ability. These findings provide evidence for dynamic mental representation in infancy.

Assessment of Pilot Situational Awareness: Measurement via Simulation

While pilots have an intuitive understanding of situational awareness (SA), researchers have had difficulty defining and measuring SA for practical ends such as pilot selection, training and cockpit design evaluation. To achieve the latter end a model of SA is proposed and a measurement technique is described. Specifically, SA appears to involve the development and maintenance of a highly dynamic mental representation of critical aspects of the flying environment. Using this system the pilot makes judicious decisions in a timely manner with little conscious effort. To render SA measurable, SA may be modeled as a computer system with elements and processes which serve to develop and maintain an extremely fast, efficient database. Computer systems are assessed via benchmark tests. To measure SA, the pilot flies a benchmark test which consists of a standardized mission in a medium fidelity simulator under progressively increasing assigned airspeeds. The pilot's SA is measured via techniques including objective metrics such as flying performance and responses to “unexpected” events, as well as subjective metrics such as ratings and knowledge elicitation. All must of necessity be indirect measures of SA, for the pilot's actions reflect not only SA but the adequacy of the data initially available as well as the quality of training, talent, and the vehicle itself. A statistically weighted combination of these measures is used in order to improve sensitivity and minimize their individual limitations.

Dynamic mental representations.

Dynamic mental representations.

Subjectivity in parent-infant relationships: A discussion of internal working models

Bowlby (1969/1982, 1973, 1980) has proposed that internal working models of self and other are psychic structures that guide an individual's subjective experience of and responses to others in important relationships. They are termed “working” models because they are believed to be dynamic mental representations that are modifiable, although they are presumed to become more resistant to change after the early years. This paper reviews Bowlby's construct of internal working models, including some recent empirical evidence usefully explained by the construct. The authors apply the construct of working models to parents' subjective experiences of their infants and review some preliminary evidence that suggests that parental working models of their infants are present even prior to the infants' birth and influence the parents' perception and interpretation of the infants' characteristics and behaviors. The authors then consider the development of infants' working models of self and other in the context of parental attributions. They conclude that subjectivity in parent-infant relationships is an exciting and promising area for investigation, although, at present, future progress is limited by problems of measurement. A brief discussion of directions for future research is included.

Dynamic mental representations.

Dynamic mental representations.

The mental representation of movement when static stimuli are viewed.

If the representation of movement is a fundamental organizing principle of cognition, as hypothesized here, it should be possible to find cases in which static stimuli induce a dynamic mental representation. Subjects viewed frozen-action photographs, and their memory for these scenes was tested. They found it harder to reject distractors when the distractors were photographs of the same scene shot later in time than when the distractors were photographs shot earlier in time. In a second study, an asymmetry in goodness of apparent motion was found between forward and backward action sequences. Both results support the hypothesis that people represent the motion implicit in a photograph.

Dynamic Mental Representation: An Analysis of the Empathic Process

Dynamic Mental Representation: An Analysis of the Empathic Process