Krzysztof Krejtz

The present longitudinal quasi-experimental study examined the extent to which music education is related to the development of attentional control. Control of visual attention was examined with the use of an antisaccade task in an eye tracking study. Fifty primary school children (6–7 years old), 25 from music school matched on fluid intelligence with their peers from non-music primary school, performed the antisaccade task three times, at the beginning of school education, after 12 and 24 months. Their eye movements were recorded each time. Over time, attentional control increased in both groups. Music school children performed significantly better than general school children in antisaccadic trials. In line with the prediction, all students’ correct responses in the antisaccade task were faster over the time of education, supporting growth in their ability of attentional control. Yet this growth was significantly greater in music school children. Only music school children significantly decrease the latency of saccades toward the target in the correct antisaccade trials. No such trend was significant for children without music education. Finally, fluid intelligence increased over time in both groups. The present study demonstrated a relationship between systematic music education for the development of children’s attentional control.

Web accessibility features on websites are designed for individuals with disabilities that include low vision and cognitive impairments, but such features can benefit everyone. This study investigates the impact of accessibility features of the web on ambient/focal visual attention and cognitive processing in individuals without disabilities. The study involved 20 participants reading news websites with different levels of low vision and cognitive-related accessibility features while their eye movements and heart rate variability were monitored. The findings show that cognitive engagement declined over time when no accessibility enhancements were present. The study also demonstrates that enhancing cognitive accessibility leads to increased user cognitive engagement, while low vision accessibility features make websites easier to read. These findings are corroborated by self-reports and psychophysiological measures, such as eye-tracking metrics and heart rate variability. The effects from these psychophysiological measures, together with participants’ self-reports, support the benefits of enhancing web accessibility features for all users. The implications for future website design are also discussed.

The paper describes an eye-tracking framework for offline analysis of and real-time interaction with gaze-responsive subtitled media. The eventual goal is to introduce and to evaluate gaze-responsive subtitles, which afford pausing of video when reading subtitles. Initial modes of interaction include: look-to-read and look-to-release. The former pauses video as long as gaze is detected over subtitles, the latter pauses video until gaze falls on subtitles. To avoid disrupted perception of media content, an additional ambient soundtrack matched to the general content of video is proposed. Note that this is potentially revolutionary as it would require an entirely novel approach to film direction. Just as Audio Description is now included in most modern films, ambient sound would also be needed to fill in brief temporal gaps when the user’s visual attention is directed toward subtitles. Concomitantly, the eye-tracking framework fosters quantitative analysis of attention to audiovisual content apart from qualitative evaluation on which most of subtitling standardization is based.