Using aversive conditioning with near-real-time feedback to shape eye movements during naturalistic viewing
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Using aversive conditioning with near-real-time feedback to shape eye movements during naturalistic viewing Brian A. Anderson 1 Accepted: 31 August 2020 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Strategically shaping patterns of eye movements through training has manifold promising applications, with the potential to improve the speed and efficiency of visual search, improve the ability of humans to extract information from complex displays, and help correct disordered eye movement patterns. However, training how a person moves their eyes when viewing an image or scene is notoriously difficult, with typical approaches relying on explicit instruction and strategy, which have notable limitations. The present study introduces a novel approach to eye movement training using aversive conditioning with near-real-time feedback. Participants viewed indoor scenes (eight scenes presented over 48 trials) with the goal of remembering those scenes for a later memory test. During viewing, saccades meeting specific amplitude and direction criteria probabilistically triggered an aversive electric shock, which was felt within 50 ms after the eliciting eye movement, allowing for a close temporal coupling between an oculomotor behavior and the feedback intended to shape it. Results demonstrate a bias against performing an initial saccade in the direction paired with shock (Experiment 1) or generally of the amplitude paired with shock (Experiment 2), an effect that operates without apparent awareness of the relationship between shocks and saccades, persists into extinction, and generalizes to the viewing of novel images. The present study serves as a proof of concept concerning the implementation of near-real-time feedback in eye movement training. Keywords Aversive conditioning . Saccades . Training
Eye movements are a ubiquitous part of everyday life for individuals with a fully functioning visual system. A typical person makes several saccadic eye movements per second when scanning the natural world (Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005; Henderson, 2003), and such eye movements are necessary for representing different aspects of the visual world with the detail and precision afforded by the high-acuity fovea (Curcio et al., 1990; Jacobs, 1979). It is therefore unsurprising that eye movement patterns are associated with the efficiency and accuracy of visual search performance (Najemnik & Geisler, 2005; Neider & Zelinsky, 2006; Zelinsky et al., 1997) and with later memory for visual displays (Hollingworth & Henderson, 2002; Voss et al., 2017; Zelinsky & Loschky, 2005). How a person moves their eyes when scanning the visual world is directly related to their
* Brian A. Anderson [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, 4235 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4235, USA
perceptual experience, with far-reaching implications for health, safety, and well-being. The ability to strategically shape how a person moves their eyes when scanning a scene has manifold potential benefits. There are many situations and profess
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