Wearable computing: Will it make people prosocial?

Abstract

We recently reported that people who wear an eye tracker modify their natural looking behaviour in a prosocial manner. This change in looking behaviour represents a potential concern for researchers who wish to use eye trackers to understand the functioning of human attention. On the other hand, it may offer a real boon to manufacturers and consumers of wearable computing (e.g., Google Glass), for if wearable computing causes people to behave in a prosocial manner, then the public's fear that people with wearable computing will invade their privacy is unfounded. Critically, both of these divergent implications are grounded on the assumption that the prosocial behavioural effect of wearing an eye tracker is sustained for a prolonged period of time. Our study reveals that on the very first wearing of an eye tracker, and in less than 10 minutes, the prosocial effect of an eye tracker is abolished, but by drawing attention back to the eye tracker the implied presence effect is easily reactivated. This suggests that eye trackers induce a transient social presence effect which is rendered dormant when attention is shifted away from the source of implied presence. This is good news for researchers who use eye trackers to measure attention and behaviour; and could be bad news for advocates of wearable computing in everyday life.Words:217

Task Experience as a Boundary Condition for the Negative Effects of Irrelevant Information on Learning

“…It seems that participants in experiment 3 scored somewhat lower on the cued recall test after block 1 than participants in experiment 2 (Tables 2 and 3), leaving more room for improvement in the matched condition in experiment 3. We cannot rule out that awareness of being eye tracked had something to do with this lower performance in the first block, although very few studies have addressed effects of eye tracking on viewing behaviour (see Nasiopoulos et al, 2015;Risko & Kingstone, 2011), and we do not know of studies addressing effects on learning or performance, so this remains speculative. It should also be kept in mind that this might just be chance variation due to the smaller sample size in experiment 3.…”

The effect of visualization on visual search performance

“…The red graph shows the prior, taken from Reinhart et al (2015), while the green line shows the likelihood of our data cap believed that their compliance with instructions to "visualize" could actually be verified by the experimenter, and hence were more likely to follow that instruction. Effects along these lines have been found in the eye-tracking literature (Nasiopoulos et al, 2015) in which participants modify their viewing behavior when they know their eyes are being tracked. Instructions to visualize did have an impact on reaction time in our study (albeit opposite to what was found previously) so there was some evidence that our participants were attempting to comply with instructions.…”

Forecasting user attention during everyday mobile interactions using device-integrated and wearable sensors

“…Fourth, the current hardware setup is rather bulky (head-mounted mobile eye tracker, multiple cameras, mobile phone, laptop backpack), which might have influenced participants' attentive behaviour. Therefore, investigating in-the-wild studies with participants' awareness about the recording will be an interesting future project [29,37] Fully integrating the required cameras is an important direction for future work, but likely to be feasible given recent advances in fully embedded head-mounted eye tracking [43].…”