Video Stimuli Research Articles

Positive influence of certain sports on learning and second language acquisition processes

Various research convincingly demonstrated positive influence of certain sports and physical exercises on brain and brain functions in general, and on cognitive functions in particular. As it has been demonstrated, efficient and well-developed cognitive functions enhance all human activities and are of crucial importance for learning. In particular, this paper focuses on the positive correlation between certain sports and language learning and its relevance to the Second Language Acquisition studies (SLA). In SLA, students' ability to process input strongly depends on their cognitive abilities, namely, their abilities to process audio and visual input. As various researchers demonstrated, some sports enhance sportsmen's abilities of audio and visual perception; these developed cognitive abilities may, in turn, enhance SLA process. The paper analyses some data collected during the experiments with three groups of students, age 20-23: basketball players, judo wrestlers and control group whose members practiced sports only 2h/week. Three groups were exposed to three types of stimuli: (reverse chess pattern, tone click, flash of light); their brain activity was monitored by EEG. The obtained results demonstrated that basketball players manifested better-developed cognitive abilities responsible for the perception of audio and video stimuli. They were also faster in making decisions on the basis of the video/audio stimuli perceived. Similar results were obtained by American psychologists (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Their study involved 87 Brazilian volleyball players and 67 persons who don't practice sports. The results were published in Frontiers in Psychology. Experiments have shown that athletes are usually better in controlling their reactions and are able to slow down their reactions, if necessary. According to the professor of Psychology Arthur Kramer, one of the authors of the research, "Athletes can perceive information faster and switch quicker between different tasks than those who don't practice sports." During the experiment, all the participants were asked to perform tasks to test their cognitive abilities (information perception, memory, reactions). The most interesting discovery was that the athletes had significant cognitive advantages over women and men who had not practiced sports. Volleyball players were faster in reactions, in noticing differences in the pictures, in identifying the missing details in puzzles. The process of auditory and visual perception and processing involves many neural structures: from primary units of signal processing sensors to higher levels of processing, responsible for stimuli recognition and decision-making. As it is known, individual waves of cognitive evoked potentials reflect the involvement of certain neural mechanisms of visual and auditory systems in processing and recognition of stimuli of corresponding modality. Wave characteristics can indirectly indicate working speed of specific units of the neural circuit and the number of neurons involved; it may allow measuring the influence of various sports training loads on the development of neural chains involved in audio/video stimuli perception, processing and decision-making. These aspects are also considered important for input processing in SLA. The paper analyses positive contribution of certain sports to learning in general, and Second Language Acquisition in particular, using neuroscience, psychological and socio-cultural approaches.

Impaired Affect Perception In Presence Of Spared Electodermal Acitivity With Affective Stimuli Among Children With Specific Learning Disorders: A Controlled Study

The aim of this study was to compare children with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) and matched controls in terms of nonverbal communication skills, understanding of emotions, electrodermal activity (EDA) changes and response latencies measured with affective stimuli. The study was designed as a single-center, cross-sectional, controlled study. KA-SI Empathic Tendency Scale-Child Form, Test of Perception of Affect-Via Nonverbal Cues (TPANC) were used for both groups. The TPANC test was performed in 4 different sessions (for picture, video, audio and textual stimuli), and during each session, the EDA was measured from the non-dominant hand. Stimuli were given at 15 second intervals in the tests and phasic changes within 3-8 seconds after the stimulus was accepted as skin conductance responses related to the stimulus in accordance with the literature. The responses and response latency during the TPANC test were recorded by the clinician. 31 children with SLD and 31 healthy controls were included in the study. The mean ages for SLD and controls were 10 years 6 months and 10 years 1 month; respectively. In the SLD group, the number of correct responses in all subtests of TPANC was statistically significantly lower than controls (p<0.05). When TPANC subtests response latencies were compared, there was a significant increase in the SLD group compared to controls (p<0.05). The groups did not display a significant difference in EDA changes while providing responses in TPANC. Our results contribute to the literature on the affect recognition and its autonomic correlates among children with SLD. However, dependence on a single-modality for autonomic nervous system reactivity and limited sample size may affect our results and further studies with larger samples employing multiple domains of autonomic reactivity may be needed.

Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments.

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments-that is, judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects are not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment.

An experimental study of the detection of clicks in English

Abstract This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until relatively recently. For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds.

Using eye-tracking to investigate teacher gaze: Data accuracy and drawing of meaningful dynamic areas of interest in video stimuli

Studie, které zkoumají pozornost učitelů skrze eye-tracking vykazují velkou různorodost co se týče stylu reportování a pohledu na kvalitu dat. Důvodem může být to, že eye-tracking je v oblasti výzkumu učitele poměrně novou metodou a systematická metodologická doporučení prozatím neexistují. To se týká především kvality sbíraných dat (tedy přesnosti) a způsobu jejich zpracování skrze vykreslení dynamických oblastí zájmu (areas of interest, AOI) ve video stimulech. Předkládaná studie zkoumá vliv různých hladin akceptované přesnosti dat na počet fixací a tři způsoby vykreslení AOI (AOI ve tvaru žáka kreslená pomocí křivek; AOI tváře žáka kreslená pomocí oválů; AOI oblasti žáka vykreslená obdélníkem) na standardní eye-trackingové proměnné: počet fixací, počet pohledů (glances) a délka fixace. 62 účastníků sledovalo video stimul s pěti označenými žáky, kteří představovali cílové AOI. Byla provedena jednoduchá analýza rozptylu s cílem určit vliv různých hladin přesnosti dat (&gt;1°, &gt; 0.5° to ≤ 1.0°, and ≤ 0.5°) na počet ficaxí. Vliv tří typů vykreslení dynamických AOI byl zkoumán pomocí několika jendofaktorových analýz rozptylu s opakovaným měřením. Výsledky neukázaly významný rozdíl mezi jednotlivými hladinami přesnosti. Významné rozdíly byly ale pozorovány u různých typů AOI. Při použití obdélníků bylo zaznamenáno více fixací a více návštěv AOI než u dalších dvou typů AOI. Nejdelší průměrné fixace byly zaznamenány u AOI zaměřených pouze na tváře žáků. Tyto výsledky nazančují, že je nutné zvážit výběr tvaru AOI v závislosti na výzkumné otázce a pozice AOI v prostoru a zároveň věnovat pozornost přesnosti dat.

Probing the association between maternal anxious attachment style and mother-child brain-to-brain coupling during passive co-viewing of visual stimuli

ABSTRACT Brain-to-brain coupling during co-viewing of video stimuli reflects similar intersubjective mentalisation processes. During an everyday joint activity of watching video stimuli (television shows) with her child, an anxiously attached mother’s preoccupation with her child is likely to distract her from understanding the mental state of characters in the show. To test the hypothesis that reduced coupling in the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) would be observed with increasing maternal attachment anxiety (MAA), we profiled mothers’ MAA using the Attachment Style Questionnaire and used functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess PFC coupling in 31 mother-child dyads while they watched three 1-min animation videos together. Reduced coupling was observed with increasing MAA in the medial right PFC cluster which is implicated in mentalisation processes. This result did not survive control analyses and should be taken as preliminary. Reduced coupling between anxiously-attached mothers and their children during co-viewing could undermine quality of shared experiences.

CorrNet: Fine-Grained Emotion Recognition for Video Watching Using Wearable Physiological Sensors.

Recognizing user emotions while they watch short-form videos anytime and anywhere is essential for facilitating video content customization and personalization. However, most works either classify a single emotion per video stimuli, or are restricted to static, desktop environments. To address this, we propose a correlation-based emotion recognition algorithm (CorrNet) to recognize the valence and arousal (V-A) of each instance (fine-grained segment of signals) using only wearable, physiological signals (e.g., electrodermal activity, heart rate). CorrNet takes advantage of features both inside each instance (intra-modality features) and between different instances for the same video stimuli (correlation-based features). We first test our approach on an indoor-desktop affect dataset (CASE), and thereafter on an outdoor-mobile affect dataset (MERCA) which we collected using a smart wristband and wearable eyetracker. Results show that for subject-independent binary classification (high-low), CorrNet yields promising recognition accuracies: and for V-A on CASE, and and for V-A on MERCA. Our findings show: (1) instance segment lengths between 1–4 s result in highest recognition accuracies (2) accuracies between laboratory-grade and wearable sensors are comparable, even under low sampling rates (≤64 Hz) (3) large amounts of neutral V-A labels, an artifact of continuous affect annotation, result in varied recognition performance.

Heading perception depends on time-varying evolution of optic flow

There is considerable support for the hypothesis that perception of heading in the presence of rotation is mediated by instantaneous optic flow. This hypothesis, however, has never been tested. We introduce a method, termed "nonvarying phase motion," for generating a stimulus that conveys a single instantaneous optic flow field, even though the stimulus is presented for an extended period of time. In this experiment, observers viewed stimulus videos and performed a forced-choice heading discrimination task. For nonvarying phase motion, observers made large errors in heading judgments. This suggests that instantaneous optic flow is insufficient for heading perception in the presence of rotation. These errors were mostly eliminated when the velocity of phase motion was varied over time to convey the evolving sequence of optic flow fields corresponding to a particular heading. This demonstrates that heading perception in the presence of rotation relies on the time-varying evolution of optic flow. We hypothesize that the visual system accurately computes heading, despite rotation, based on optic acceleration, the temporal derivative of optic flow.

The Attraction of Synchrony: A Hip-Hop Dance Study.

This study investigated an evolutionary-adaptive explanation for the cultural ubiquity of choreographed synchronous dance: that it evolved to increase interpersonal aesthetic appreciation and/or attractiveness. In turn, it is assumed that this may have facilitated social bonding and therefore procreation between individuals within larger groups. In this dual-dancer study, individuals performed fast or slow hip-hop choreography to fast-, medium-, or slow-tempo music; when paired laterally, this gave rise to split-screen video stimuli in which there were four basic categories of dancer and music synchrony: (1) synchronous dancers, synchronous music; (2) synchronous dancers, asynchronous music; (3) asynchronous dancers, one dancer synchronous with music; and (4) asynchronous dancers, asynchronous music. Participants’ pupil dilations and aesthetic appreciation of the dancing were recorded for each video, with the expectation that these measures would covary with levels of synchronization. While results were largely consistent with the hypothesis, the findings also indicated that interpersonal aesthetic appreciation was driven by a hierarchy of synchrony between the dancers: stimuli in which only one dancer was synchronous with the music were rated lower than stimuli in which the dancers were asynchronous with each other and with the music; i.e., stimuli in which the dancers were unequal were judged less favorably than those in which the dancers were equal, albeit asynchronously. Stimuli in which all elements were synchronous, dancers and music, were rated highest and, in general, elicited greater pupil dilations.

Cowitness identification speed affects choices from target-absent photospreads.

Three studies examined the influence of a witness's identification speed on the identification decision of another witness. Based on research documenting cowitness effects we expected cowitness speed to affect identification decisions from target-absent photospreads. Without prior research testing the effects of cowitness speed, we did not have a specific prediction regarding how fast (vs. slow) cowitness identification decisions would affect participant-witnesses' identification rates in Study 1. Based on the results from Study 1, in Study 2 we predicted that fast (vs. slow) cowitness decisions would increase choices from target-absent photospreads when the cowitness was known to have made a positive identification. In Study 3, cowitnesses rejected the photospread. Based on the previous studies, we hypothesized that fast (vs. slow) cowitness decisions would decrease choices from target-absent photospreads. However, because a photospread rejection is qualitatively different from an identification, this prediction was tentative. In all three studies, participants watched one of 2 stimulus videos with a confederate cowitness. After the video, the confederate made a fast (10 s) or slow (4 min) identification. Participants then attempted an identification from a target-absent photospread. In Study 1 (N = 101), the confederate's decision from the photospread was ambiguous. In Study 2 (N = 200) the confederate announced making a positive identification. In Study 3 (N = 151) the confederate cowitness rejected the photospread. In all 3 studies, participants paired with a fast cowitness made more choices from the target-absent photospread than did participants paired with a slow cowitness. Fast cowitness identifications increased choices from the target-absent photospread regardless of whether a cowitness's decision was ambiguous (Study 1), whether they made an identification (Study 2), or rejected the photospread (Study 3). Given the effects of cowitness speed on identification decisions, it might be advisable to standardize the duration of identification procedures and inform witnesses of this standardization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A Generalized Encoding System for Alpha Oscillations Through Visual Saliency Analysis.

By learning how the brain reacts to external visual stimuli and examining possible triggered brain statuses, we conduct a systematic study on an encoding problem that estimates ongoing EEG dynamics from visual information. A novel generalized system is proposed to encode the alpha oscillations modulated during video viewing by employing the visual saliency involved in the presented natural video stimuli. Focusing on the parietal and occipital lobes, the encoding effects at different alpha frequency bins and brain locations are examined by a real-valued genetic algorithm (GA), and possible links between alpha features and saliency patterns are constructed. The robustness and reliability of the proposed system are demonstrated in a 10-fold cross-validation. The results show that stimuli with different saliency levels can induce significant changes in occipito-parietal alpha oscillations and that alpha at higher frequency bins responded the most in involuntary attention related to bottom-up-based visual processing. This study provides a novel approach to understand the processing of involuntary attention in the brain dynamics and would further be beneficial to the development of brain-computer interfaces and visual design.

An electroencephalographic examination of the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR)

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a perceptual phenomenon characterized by pleasurable tingling sensations in the head and neck, as well as pleasurable feelings of relaxation, that reliably arise while attending to a specific triggering stimulus (e.g., whispering or tapping sounds). Currently, little is known about the neutral substrates underlying these experiences. In this study, 14 participants who experience ASMR, along with 14 control participants, were presented with four video stimuli and four auditory stimuli. Half of these stimuli were designed to elicit ASMR and half were non-ASMR control stimuli. Brain activity was measured using a 32-channel EEG system. The results indicated that ASMR stimuli-particularly auditory stimuli-elicited increased alpha wave activity in participants with self-reported ASMR, but not in matched control participants. Similar increases were also observed in frequency bands associated with movement (gamma waves and sensorimotor rhythm). These results are consistent with the reported phenomenology of ASMR, which involves both attentional and sensorimotor characteristics.

Self-focused attention vs. negative attentional bias during public speech task in socially anxious individuals

Enhanced self-focused attention (SFA) and negative attentional bias (NAB) towards social cues are characteristic hallmarks of social anxiety. It is essential to investigate these two attentional phenomena under socially relevant situations using comparable stimuli. In the present study, individuals with high social anxiety (HSA, n = 32) and low social anxiety (LSA, n = 29) were compared according to their attention toward self-related stimuli and toward positive, neutral, and negative feedback related stimuli. Video stimuli of moving indicators of self-anxiety-status and positive, neutral, and negative feedback from an audience were presented during an impromptu speech task (high anxiety condition) and a re-watching phase (low anxiety condition). Eye movements in response to the different stimuli served as readouts for attentional preference. An interaction effect suggested that the HSA group directed more attention to self-related stimuli relative to other stimuli and the LSA group only during the high anxiety condition. The LSA group exhibited a general attentional preference toward positive feedback, especially during the low anxiety condition. Meanwhile, only the total duration of fixation on positive feedback negatively correlated with subjective anxiety rating. Our results point to increased SFA rather than NAB in HSA individuals under social threats.

Modeling the Timing and Duration of Grip Behavior to Express Emotions for a Social Robot

This letter addresses the effects of grip timing to express a robot's emotions to people while they are watching a video stimulus together. Past studies on human-robot touch interaction focused on the types of touch behaviors for expressing a robot's emotion, but timing factors have received less attention. In this letter, we conducted data collection to investigate the appropriate grip timing to express heartwarming and horror emotions. Participants identified touch (grip) timing and durations by using a robot while they are watching video stimuli. Typically, they preferred a grip timing before a climax for horror videos but after a climax for heartwarming videos. We modeled the timing and durations by a fitting approach to probabilistic distribution to reproduce human-like touch behaviors, and also we implemented the models to an android robot.

Developmental changes in infants’ and children’s attention to faces and salient regions vary across and within video stimuli.

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a global shift over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether this shift is truly global, that is, consistent across and within stimuli despite variations in content. To test the global shift hypothesis, we recorded eye movements of 89 children (6 months to 10 years) and adults while they viewed 7 video clips. We measured the extent to which each participant attended to faces and to salient areas for each video. There was no evidence of global age-related changes in attention: Neither feature showed consistent increases or decreases with age. Moreover, windowed analyses within each stimulus video revealed significant moment-to-moment variations in the relation between age and each visual feature (via a bootstrapping analysis). For some time windows, adults looked more often at both feature types compared to infants and children. However, for other time windows, the pattern was reversed-younger participants looked more at faces and salient locations. Lack of consistent directional effects provides strong evidence against the global shift hypothesis. We suggest an alternative explanation: Over development, observers increasingly prioritize when and where to look by learning to track which features are relevant within a scene. Implications for the development of visual attention and children's understanding of screen-based media are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Examination of emotional contagion and social anxiety using novel video stimuli

ABSTRACT Background and Objectives Socially anxious individuals often exhibit signs of anxiety that might elicit discomfort in others and negatively influence their interactions, due in part to emotional contagion. However, there is limited research examining the phenomenon of emotional contagion in social anxiety, which is the topic of the current study. Design and Methods An experimental design was used in which undergraduate psychology students (N = 128) were assigned to either an experimental condition (watching a video of a socially anxious presenter) or a control condition (watching a video of a nonanxious presenter). Various measures were administered to assess social anxiety, emotional contagion, state anxiety, and related constructs. Results After controlling for baseline anxiety levels, participants in the experimental condition reported significantly higher levels of anxiety during and immediately after watching the video compared to individuals in the control condition (multivariate analysis of covariance, analysis of variance). Similar results were found across both conditions in participants with higher levels of trait social anxiety and higher public speaking anxiety (moderated regression analyses). Conclusions The findings suggest that social anxiety may be emotionally contagious, and provides insight into the role that emotional contagion may play in the association between social anxiety and interpersonal functioning.

Creating video stimuli for the modelling of eating behaviour

Creating video stimuli for the modelling of eating behaviour

Mobile contextual marketing in a museum setting

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate how the contextual marketing strategy facilitated by mobile technology enhances consumers’ purchase intention and experiential quality in a hedonic service setting – museum. Specifically, this study explores the impacts of a context-triggered push notification promoting context-related souvenirs embedded in the museum mobile app on visitors’ souvenir purchase intention and visit experience.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopted a scenario-based experimental design with video stimuli and a follow-up survey questionnaire. A total of 151 participants were randomly assigned to one of the two art museum visiting scenarios (i.e. with vs without the in-app push notification). A series of one-way ANOVA comparisons and serial mediation tests were conducted for hypotheses testing.FindingsThe results show that the mobile app promoting context-related souvenirs positively affects museum visitors’ souvenir purchase intention without undermining their experiential quality. The serial mediation effects through contextual perceived value and impulse buying tendency further explain how the in-app push notification influences visitors’ souvenir purchase intention.Originality/valueThis study extends the contextual marketing research to a unique service domain (i.e. museum) and contributes to the service technology literature. The findings present empirical evidence for the effectiveness of mobile contextual marketing and its potential to enhance consumers’ experiential quality in a hedonic service setting. The current research provides practical guidelines to both the museum management and mobile app developers.

Presence of parent, gender and emotional valence influences preschoolers' PFC processing of video stimuli

ABSTRACT Unprecedented increases in child exposure to diverse videos has resulted in a need to understand how children process videos. While children show distinct activations in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when presented with children's movies, multiple factors influence child neural response to screen media, namely, presence of a specific parent, gender differences and emotional valence. Sixty-two children (37 boys) aged 3 to 4 and their parents (33 mothers, 29 fathers) were recruited fora joint video task involving three video clips that varied in emotional valence while children's neural responses were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. We found a significant interaction effect between emotional valence and gender. Children who engaged in joint-viewing with their fathers also showed significantly stronger PFC activity than with their mothers, regardless of emotional valence of video. Our findings suggest how, at a PFC level, different factors interact and influence the joint-viewing experience amongst parent–child dyads.

Personality Sensing

Personality detection is an important task in psychology, as different personality traits are linked to different behaviours and real-life outcomes. Traditionally it involves filling out lengthy questionnaires, which is time-consuming, and may also be unreliable if respondents do not fully understand the questions or are not willing to honestly answer them. In this article, we propose a framework for objective personality detection that leverages humans’ physiological responses to external stimuli. We exemplify and evaluate the framework in a case study, where we expose subjects to affective image and video stimuli, and capture their physiological responses using non-invasive commercial-grade eye-tracking and skin conductivity sensors. These responses are then processed and used to build a machine learning classifier capable of accurately predicting a wide range of personality traits. We investigate and discuss the performance of various machine learning methods, the most and least accurately predicted traits, and also assess the importance of the different stimuli, features, and physiological signals. Our work demonstrates that personality traits can be accurately detected, suggesting the applicability of the proposed framework for robust personality detection and use by psychology practitioners and researchers, as well as designers of personalised interactive systems.