Graduate School of Informatics /Cognitive Science

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Aysel Yasemin Göl will defend his thesis.

Title: AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF CHANGE BLINDNESS BY GROUP EYE TRACKING PARADIGM

Date: 01th June 2018

Time: 10:00 AM

Place: A-108

Thesis Abstract :The group effect refers to a decline in vigilance when an individual is in a social, group setting. Due to a diluted risk of being preyed upon and a higher number of group members that can detect a predator, members are less alert when they are in a group. The present study investigates if such an effect can be observed in human participants in a simple change detection task by employing group eye tracking (GET) paradigm. For this end, the visual phenomenon of change blindness is explored. In a within-subjects experiment, participants attempted to find if a change has been made to a stimulus they have previously seen. The same task was performed twice, once alone and once in a group of three while their eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker. Results of eye movement analysis show that, during the visual search for a change, eye movements are significantly slower when the participants are in groups (p < .01). The findings indicate that this effect may be related to a decline in vigilance and the group effect.