Feasibility of online divergent thinking assessment

Two studies explored whether assessment of creative thinking is feasible using web-based methods and how participants reacted to the imposition of time constraints in online settings. Sixty-five participants (Study 1) completed a verbal fluency task and a divergent thinking task, half of the participants doing so over the Internet. Online administration did not affect originality, but led to slightly fewer responses overall. This demonstrated that online administration of creative thinking is indeed feasible and reliable, though steps must be taken to ensure participants exhaust all possible responses. To test the effect of time limits on responses, 84 participants (Study 2) completed a verbal fluency task and three divergent thinking tasks online, half of the participants doing so under time pressure (3 min). There were significant interactions between time limits and task content for both time-on-task and fluency variables, but the task type was the dominant force in the varying fluency and time-on-task scores. Originality was not significantly affected by time limits, but did vary across tasks. In all cases the results illustrate that assessment of divergent thinking, as a proxy of creative thinking, is feasible using online methods. Implications for future work in this area are discussed.     

Tactile interruption management: tactile cues as task-switching reminders

Tactile cuing has been suggested as a method of interruption management for busy visual environments. This study examined the effectiveness of tactile cues as an interruption management strategy in a multi-tasking environment. Sixty-four participants completed a continuous aircraft monitoring task with periodic interruptions of a discrete gauge memory task. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups; one group had to remember to monitor for interruptions while the other group received tactile cues indicating an interruption’s arrival and location. As expected, the cued participants evidenced superior performance on both tasks. The results are consistent with the notion that tactile cues transform the resource-intensive, time-based task of remembering to check for interruptions into a simpler, event-based task, where cues assume a portion of the workload, permitting the application of valuable resources to other task demands. This study is discussed in the context of multiple resource theory and has practical implications for systems design in environments consisting of multiple, visual tasks and time-sensitive information.     

Responsiveness to a game-based intervention to enhance reading efficiency in first graders

In the present study, a 5-week tablet-based word reading efficiency game intervention (Reading Turbo) was integrated in a comprehensive phonics-based reading curriculum. The aims of the study were to examine whether the game would advance children's word reading efficiency, and to determine the extent to which pre-reading capacities and in-game mechanisms could explain individual variation in responsiveness to the game. To do so, word reading efficiency scores of first graders in an intervention group (n = 132) and a control group that continued with the usual reading curriculum (n = 118) were compared prior to, directly after, and 2 months after the 5-week intervention period. Individual variation in responsiveness was examined by relating reading precursors (i.e., phonological awareness, letter efficiency, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal working memory) measured at the onset of the intervention, and in-game accuracy and efficiency to word reading efficiency outcomes in untrained words. Results indicated that playing the word reading game significantly enhanced first graders' word reading efficiency directly after the intervention, but the effect was no longer significant 2 months after the intervention. With respect to individual variation in game responsiveness, it was found that phonological awareness, letter efficiency, and verbal working memory predicted responsiveness to the game via in-game accuracy. In addition, phonological awareness and RAN predicted responsiveness to the game via in-game efficiency, and letter efficiency and verbal working memory were directly related to responsiveness. The effectiveness of the word reading game thus differentiated between children with higher and lower pre-reading capacities, and operated via in-game child affordances.     

Lasting effects on literacy skills with a computer-assisted learning using syllabic units in low-progress readers

This study examines the effects of a computer-assisted learning (CAL) program in which syllabic units were highlighted inside words in comparison with a CAL program in which the words were not segmented, i.e. one requiring whole word recognition. In a randomised control trial design, two separate groups of French speaking poor readers (2 * 14) in first grade were constituted. They were matched on a range of reading measures and non verbal intelligence and trained intensively over a short period (10 h over a period of 5 weeks). Three tasks were proposed using a classical pre-test/training/post-test design, written word recognition, word reading aloud and word spelling. In addition, three post-test sessions were conducted: one just after training, one after 4 months, and a last one after 9 months. The experimental group trained with the CAL using syllabic units outperformed the control group using CAL with whole word recognition in all the three tasks and there were important lasting effects. The results are discussed in the light of the self-teaching hypothesis and phonological recoding.     

Effects of 2D wedge design as a wayfinding facilitator in a 3D virtual environment

The purpose of this study is to investigate users' wayfinding task performance and subjective preference in a three‐dimensional (3D) virtual environment. The research variables are interaction mode (touch sensitive vs body movement modes), viewing perspective [first‐person perspective (1PP) versus third‐person perspective (3PP)], and gender (man versus woman). Three difficult levels of tasks were conducted, i.e., A, A‐P, and A‐A types. The experiment is 2 × 2 × 2 between‐subject design. Participants needed to complete three wayfinding tasks and fill out subjective preference questionnaires regarding task fluency, satisfaction, system usability scale, and NASA Task Load Index (NASA‐TLX). Fifty‐six participants (28 men and 28 women) were invited using convenient sampling method. The results are as follows: (1) Participants adopting touch‐sensitive mode performed better than body movement mode. (2) Participants using touch‐sensitive mode could have better task fluency and higher SUS score, and with less effort and frustration. (3) Participants adopting 3PP had better wayfinding task performance than first‐person perspective. They also had higher system usability scale score and spent less effort for having wider viewing perspective. (4) The gender variable only showed significant effect in A‐P type of wayfinding task. Men performed better than women. It is concluded that adopting touch‐sensitive interaction and 3PP designs can better facilitate users' wayfinding tasks.     

The effect of distractor modality and processing code on human-automation interaction

We examined the effect of distractor characteristics (modality and processing code) on visual search performance and interaction with an automated decision aid. Multiple Resource Theory suggests that concurrent tasks that are processed similarly (e.g. two visual tasks) will cause greater interference than tasks that are not (e.g., a visual and auditory task). The impact of tasks that share processing and perceptual demands and their interaction with human-automation interaction is not established. In order to examine this, participants completed two blocks of a luggage screening simulation with or without the assistance of an automated aid. For one block, participants performed a concurrent distractor task drawn from one of four combinations of modality and processing code: auditory-verbal; auditory-spatial; visual-verbal; visual-spatial. We measured sensitivity, criterion setting, perceived workload, system trust, perceived system reliability, compliance, reliance, and confidence. Participants demonstrated highest sensitivity when performing with an auditory-spatial secondary task. Automation compliance was higher when the auditory-spatial distraction was present versus absent; however, system trust was highest in the auditory-verbal condition. Confidence (when disagreeing with the aid) was also highest when the distractor was auditory. This study indicates that some forms of auditory ‘distractors’ may actually help performance; these results further contribute to understanding how distractions influence performance when operators interact with automation and have implications for improved work environment and system design.     

Exploring Relationships Between Eye Tracking and Traditional Usability Testing Data

This study explored the relationships between eye tracking and traditional usability testing data in the context of analyzing the usability of Algebra Nation?, an online system for learning mathematics used by hundreds of thousands of students. Thirty-five undergraduate students (20 females) completed seven usability tasks in the Algebra Nation? online learning environment. The participants were asked to log in, select an instructor for the instructional video, post a question on the collaborative wall, search for an explanation of a mathematics concept on the wall, find information relating to Karma Points (an incentive for engagement and learning), and watch two instructional videos of varied content difficulty. Participants’ eye movements (fixations and saccades) were simultaneously recorded by an eye tracker. Usability testing software was used to capture all participants’ interactions with the system, task completion time, and task difficulty ratings. Upon finishing the usability tasks, participants completed the System Usability Scale. Important relationships were identified between the eye movement metrics and traditional usability testing metrics such as task difficulty rating and completion time. Eye tracking data were investigated quantitatively using aggregated fixation maps, and qualitative examination was performed on video replay of participants’ fixation behavior. Augmenting the traditional usability testing methods, eye movement analysis provided additional insights regarding revisions to the interface elements associated with these usability tasks.     

Is it really good to talk? Testing the impact of providing concurrent verbal protocols on driving performance

Abstract

Questions have been raised regarding the impact that providing concurrent verbal protocols has on task performance in various settings; however, there has been little empirical testing of this in road transport. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of providing concurrent verbal protocols on driving performance. Participants drove an instrumented vehicle around a set route, twice whilst providing a concurrent verbal protocol, and twice without. A comparison revealed no differences in behaviour related to speed, braking and steering wheel angle when driving mid-block, but a significant difference in aspects of braking and acceleration at roundabouts. When not providing a verbal protocol, participants were found to brake harder on approach to a roundabout and accelerate more heavily coming out of roundabouts. It is concluded that providing verbal protocols may have a positive effect on braking and accelerating. Practical implications related to driver training and future research are discussed.

Practitioner Summary: Verbal protocol analysis is used by ergonomists to understand aspects of cognition and decision-making during complex tasks such as driving and control room operation. This study examines the impact that it has on driving performance, providing evidence to support its continued use in ergonomics applications.     

Dual-task performance in multimodal human-computer interaction: a psychophysiological perspective

This paper examines the psychophysiological effects of mental workload in single-task and dual-task human-computer interaction. A mental arithmetic task and a manual error correction task were performed both separately and concurrently on a computer using verbal and haptic input devices. Heart rate, skin conductance, respiration and peripheral skin temperature were recorded in addition to objective performance measures and self-report questionnaires. Analysis of psychophysiological responses found significant changes from baseline for both single-task and dual-task conditions. There were also significant psychophysiological differences between the mental arithmetic task and the manual error correction task, but no differences in questionnaire results. Additionally, there was no significant psychophysiological difference between performing only the mental arithmetic task and performing both tasks at once. These findings suggest that psychophysiological measures respond differently to different types of tasks and that they do not always agree with performance or with participants’ subjective feelings.     

The relationship between post‐task and continuous‐vicarious ratings of difficulty

A study was conducted that used continuous‐vicarious ratings (CVRs) of difficulty to investigate how people make judgments of task difficulty. Twelve people performed five editing tasks using a text editor. After each task, the participants rated the overall difficulty they experienced in performing the task. They then viewed a videotape of their performance. While the participants were viewing the tape, they were asked to rate continuously the difficulty they felt they had experienced at that moment when performing the task. From this curve of difficulty over time, seven variables were obtained as possible candidates in predicting their overall task‐difficulty ratings. It was found that the contrast between the maximum or peak of the continuous rating and the mean difficulty level best accounted for the post‐task ratings of difficulty, followed by the time it took to perform a task. In other words, the more the peak difficulty stood out from the background average‐difficulty level combined with the more time spent performing a task, the higher the participants rated their overall task difficulty. A three‐variable (maximum difficulty, mean difficulty, and time) power‐function model was developed that best predicted the post‐task difficulty ratings. The terms in this model were statistically significant and accounted for 63% of the variability in the task‐difficulty ratings. These results imply that human factors practitioners may be more effective focusing on and improving what people judge to be the most difficult aspects of an interface. Indeed, the results suggest that concentrating on other areas to improve an interface may actually cause an increase in perceived difficulty simply because the problem causing the peak difficulty has become more salient.     

The Structure of Infinite Solutions of Marked and Binary Post Correspondence Problems

In the infinite Post Correspondence Problem an instance (h,g) consists of two morphisms h and g, and the problem is to determine whether or not there exists an infinite word ω such that h(ω) = g(ω). This problem is undecidable in general, but it is known to be decidable for binary and marked instances. A morphism is binary if the domain alphabet is of size 2, and marked if each image of a letter begins with a different letter. We prove that the solutions of a marked instance form a set E^ω ⋃ E^* (P ⋃ F), where P is a finite set of ultimately periodic words, E is a finite set of solutions of the PCP, and F is a finite set of morphic images of fixed points of D0L systems. We also establish the structure of infinite solutions of the binary PCP.     

Bi-catenation and shuffle product of languages

The shuffle product of two words consists of all words obtained by inserting one word into another word sparsely. The shuffle product of two languages is the union of all the shuffle products of two words taken one from each of these two languages. The bi-catenation of two languages A andB is the set . A non-empty word which is not a power of any other word is called a primitive word. A language is a prefix code if no word in this language is a prefix of any other word in this language. This paper is devoted to the investigation of the elementary properties of bi-catenation and shuffle product of languages. The families of prefix codes, disjunctive languages and languages consisting of primitive words with respective to these two operations are studied. We characterize languages of which the bi-catenation or the shuffle product with any non-empty word are prefix codes. We also derive that for any bifix code A, both and , , are disjunctive languages, where Q is the set of all primitive words over an alphabet X with more than one letter and . For the shuffle product case, surprisingly is a regular language, where a is a letter of the alphabet X. Received: 22 September 1997 / 7 January 1998     

The impact of reading fluency level on interactive information retrieval

Given an information need and the corresponding set of documents retrieved, it is known that user assessments for such documents differ from one user to another. One frequent reason that is put forward is the discordance between text complexity and user reading fluency. We explore this relationship from three different dimensions: quantitative features, subjective-assessed difficulty, and reader/text factors. In order to evaluate quantitative features, we wondered whether it is possible to find differences between documents that are evaluated by the user and those that are ignored according to the complexity of the document. Secondly, a task related to the evaluation of the relevance of short texts is proposed. For this end, users evaluated the relevance of these short texts by answering 20 queries. Documents complexity and relevance assessments were done previously by some human experts. Then, the relationship between participants assessments, experts assessments and document complexity is studied. Finally, a third experimentation was performed under the prism of neuro-Information Retrieval: while the participants were monitored with an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset, we tried to find a correlation among EEG signal, text difficulty and the level of comprehension of texts being read during the EEG recording. In light of the results obtained, we found some weak evidence showing that users responded to queries according to text complexity and user’s reading fluency. For the second and third group of experiments, we administered a sub-test from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test to ensure that participants had a roughly average reading fluency. Nevertheless, we think that additional variables should be studied in the future in order to achieve a sound explanation of the interaction between text complexity and user profile.

     

The effectiveness of adaptive versus non-adaptive learning with digital educational games

For the training of academic skills, digital educational games with integrated adaptivity are promising. Adaptive games are considered superior to non-adaptive games, because they constantly assess children's performance, and accordingly adapt the difficulty of the tasks corresponding to the children's individual level. However, empirical evidence with regard to the effectivity of adaptive compared to non-adaptive games is limited. A study was conducted with 191 children from the third year of Kinder garten who were enrolled in one of three conditions, that is, playing an adaptive version of the reading game (RG), a non-adaptive version of the RG or training with pen-and-paper exercises. In all three conditions, children trained emergent reading (phonological awareness and letter knowledge) once a week for 30 min over a period of 5 weeks. Children's performance on cognitive (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, reading fluency) and non-cognitive (motivation, self-concept) factors was assessed. Results revealed a significant improvement in phonological awareness and letter knowledge in all conditions. However, no differences between the conditions were observed with respect to children's improvement on phonological awareness and letter knowledge or on their post-test scores for reading fluency. With regard to motivation and self-concept, again, no differences in these non-cognitive factors were observed across conditions.     

Physiological responses to workload change. A test/retest examination

The purpose of this study is to examine the test/retest consistency of physiological responses induced by mental tasks. Fifteen healthy male university students were recruited as participants. They were instructed to perform a 5-min Multi-Attribute Task Battery (MATB) trial three times successively. The task difficulty level of the tracking task of the second trial was set as medium (M). The first one was set as more difficult (H) and the last trial was easiest (L). The difficulty levels of the other two tasks (resource management and system monitoring) of the MATB were identical for all three trials. The participants repeated this procedure on three different days separated by at least a 1-day interval. The order of the tasks was the same for all repeated trials, i.e., H–M–L. Tissue blood volume from the tip of the nose using a laser Doppler blood flow meter, skin potential level (SPL), ECG from three leads on the chest, systolic time intervals (pre-ejection period, left ventricular ejection time), and hemodynamic parameters (stroke volume, cardiac output) were recorded during the task trials and before and after 5-min resting periods. The participants reported their subjective workload via NASA-TLX after each task trial. Autonomic nervous system parameters derived from the above-mentioned signals, subjective workload scores, and performance indices of MATB were analyzed, and test/retest reliability was investigated. The results showed that a significant test/retest correlation was obtained for SPL for more participants than in the other parameters, although there were large individual differences.     

基于关联词对动态抽取的报道关系检测技术研究

报道关系检测是判断随机选取的两个新闻报道是否讨论同一话题的技术.提出了一种基于关联词对动态抽取的报道关系检测方法.关联词对是指在同一篇报道中出现的满足一定关系约束的两个单词,而关系约束是指一组特征的集合.该方法认为两篇报道中出现的相同的关联词对越多,两篇报道的相似度越大.实验证明基于关联词对动态抽取的报道关系检测方法取得了非常好的效果,从而证实了所提方法的有效性.同时,实验还表明,关系约束对该方法的成功实施起着非常重要的作用.     

基于词语关系的词向量模型

词向量能够以向量的形式表示词的意义,近来许多自然语言处理应用中已经融入词向量,将其作为额外特征或者直接输入以提升系统性能。然而,目前的词向量训练模型大多基于浅层的文本信息,没有充分挖掘深层的依存关系。词的词义体现在该词与其他词产生的关系中,而词语关系包含关联单位、关系类型和关系方向三个属性,因此,该文提出了一种新的基于神经网络的词向量训练模型,它具有三个顶层,分别对应关系的三个属性,更合理地利用词语关系对词向量进行训练,借助大规模未标记文本,利用依存关系和上下文关系来训练词向量。将训练得到的词向量在类比任务和蛋白质关系抽取任务上进行评价,以验证关系模型的有效性。实验表明,与skip-gram模型和CBOW模型相比,由关系模型训练得到的词向量能够更准确地表达词语的语义信息。     

拉丁化维吾尔文字特征及其基于规则的正规化

结合网络上流通的拉丁化维吾尔文字特征,以拉丁化维吾尔文单词作为研究单位,首先,通过大规模文本语料库建立了固定词库、词首字母序列库、词尾字母序列库以及特殊词库等正规化规则库。然后,利用维吾尔单词中的字母序列结构特征和相邻字母上下文信息进行了拉丁化维吾尔文的正规化,同时引用最小编辑距离的方法进一步提高了正规化正确率,并用Visual C# 编程工具实现了基于规则的拉丁化维吾尔文的正规化算法。最后,给出了实验结果,并分析了结果不佳的原因及相应的对策。
     

A Comparative Study Between Tablet and Laptop PCs: User Satisfaction and Preferences

Despite their popularity, usability studies concerning Tablet PCs are lacking. This study aimed at determining user satisfaction and preference aspects of Tablet PCs in comparison to laptop PCs and pen-and-paper environments. Several common computer tasks were examined in an experimental environment on 34 college student participants. User satisfaction and preferences were measured by comprehensive questionnaires. An analysis of variance was used for the empirical comparisons. Participants did not have any difficulty in reading, direct manipulation, and form filling tasks. There was a perception of a high number of errors by the participants for the writing task in Tablet PCs. Overall, participants found the general computing capabilities and portability of Tablet PCs impressive. However, the majority did not prefer Tablet PCs to laptop PCs to meet their everyday computing needs. Results can help designers improve the overall usability of the Tablet PC and help its development as a major computing medium.