Project Abstract

Stress is a major part of our daily lives and there is a large amount of research into its effects on the brain however despite this research the effect of stress on visual awareness and recognition is still not fully understood. Visual awareness is an essential part of our interaction with the world around us, it allows for pattern recognition and threat detection. A key part of our visual awareness is our ability to detect and understand changes. However, there is little research into how stress effects our ability to detect changes. this project aims to research into this area to help investigate if there is a link between stress and change detection and if so its nature. This project aims to create a method to measure the effect of stress on change detection via eye tracking. This method had participants view a video designed to test change detection while being eye tracked to gain a base measure for change detection. participants would then have stress induced via the Sing a Song Test (SSST) combined with a modified version of the Stroop colour word test (SCWT). The participants would then view the change detection video for a measure of stress effected change detection. This method was then tested in a pilot experiment and the results where then analysed and had statistical testing ran on it. The pilot results suggested that stress did indeed influence change detection and that a full experiment run could yield more detailed and concrete results. Using these results more in depth research could be done in stress effects on visual awareness which could be helpful data for fields of study like human computer interaction and phycology and for general daily life.

Keywords: Human Computer Interaction, Eye tracking Change Blindness, Stress effects on perception

 Conference Details

Session: Poster Session A at Poster Stand 135

Location: Sir Stanley Clarke Auditorium at Tuesday 7th 13:30 – 17:00

Markers: Joe MacInnes, Eike Neumann

Course: MSci Computer Science FI, 3rd Year

Future Plans: I’m continuing studies