Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Jul;84(5):1553-1565. doi: 10.3758/s13414-022-02512-4. Epub 2022 Jun 2.
Two experiments investigated what eye movements can reveal about how we process surprising information and how we update mental models in dynamic and unstructured environments. Participants made saccades to visual targets presented one at a time, radially, around an invisible perimeter. Target locations were normally distributed and shifted at an unannounced point during the task. Trials following the shift were considered surprising and unexpected. These unexpected and surprising events prompted the need to update. Slower saccadic latencies were observed for surprising/unexpected events, perhaps indicative of the need to reorient attention to the unexpected target location. Longer dwell times were observed for events that signaled a change in the distribution. These data show that eye movement metrics provide a reliable indicator of mental model updating when contingencies change even in the absence of explicit change signals.
两项实验研究了眼动如何揭示我们如何处理令人惊讶的信息，以及我们如何在动态和非结构化的环境中更新心理模型。参与者注视着一次一个地呈现在一个无形边界周围的视觉目标。目标位置呈正态分布，并在任务期间的某个未宣布的点上移动。在移动之后的试验被认为是令人惊讶和意外的。这些意外和令人惊讶的事件促使人们需要更新。对于令人惊讶/意外的事件，观察到较慢的眼跳潜伏期，这可能表明需要将注意力重新定向到意外的目标位置。对于表示分布变化的事件，观察到更长的停留时间。这些数据表明，即使在没有明确变化信号的情况下，当环境发生变化时，眼动指标也能可靠地反映心理模型的更新。
