Guiding Intent

No MRI for you: It looks as though one of the primary reason for not using MRI to detect behavior (and make money off of it) is not because the science of dimensionality reduction from brain activity is barely understood. More likely, it is because some type of regulation will forbid the use of MRI altogether. This is a stunning development as there is no scientific ground on which these regulations stand. I am only half joking on this topic as I cannot understand how an entity like the EU can pass a law that in effect will kill people and prevent them from doing Compressed Sensing.

This news and the fact that not everybody has access to a full scale fMRI system is all the more reason to consider reverting to more passive means of detecting intention. Previously, I mentioned the issue of eye tracking to detect autism (a business case Part I, Part II, Part III). The issue of detecting autism early is all the more important for families that already have a case of autism. They want to know very early if this same condition affect the new siblings. The idea is that through some very early detection and appropriate therapy, the brain may train itself to work better very early, resulting in a tremendous difference in the final diagnosis. As it turns out, these posts also were hinting that gaze following deficiency was a likely culprit for language deficiencies. But there seems to be an additional reason as to why eye tracking could even attract a larger crowd (not just the people affected with autism): Scientific Inference making or guiding intention.

Michael J. Spivey and Elizabeth Grant [1] did a study in 2003 suggesting a relationship between eye movements and problem-solving by showing that certain patterns of eye movement were reflected as participants got closer to solving the problem. More recently, Laura E. Thomas and Alejandro Lleras
tried to evaluate this further in this paper [2]

In a recent study, Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can implicitly impact cognition. In an "insight" problem-solving task, participants whose gaze moved in trajectories reflecting the spatial constraints of the problem's solution were more likely to solve the problem. The authors proposed that perceptual manipulations to the problem diagram that influence eye movement trajectories during inspection would indirectly impact the likelihood of successful problem solving by way of this implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. However, when testing this claim, Grant and Spivey failed to record eye movements and simply assumed that their perceptual manipulations successfully produced eye movement trajectories compatible with the problem's solution. Our goal was to directly test their claim by asking participants to perform an insight problem-solving task under free-viewing conditions while occasionally guiding their eye movements (via an unrelated tracking task) in either a pattern suggesting the problem's solution (related group) or in patterns that were unrelated to the solution (unrelated group). Eye movements were recorded throughout the experiment. Although participants reported that they were not aware of any relationship between the tracking task and the insight problem, the rate of successful problem solving was higher in the related than in the unrelated group, in spite of there being no scanning differences between groups during the free-viewing intervals. This experiment provides strong support for Grant and Spivey's claim that in spatial tasks, cognition can be "guided" by the patterns in which we move our eyes around the scene.

in the paper they eventually claim:

We believe that eye movement trajectories can serve as implicit “thought” guides in spatial reasoning tasks...Although additional studies are necessary to determine how powerful this link between eye movements and cognition is, it is now clear that not only do eye movements reflect what we are thinking, they can also influence how we think.

This is fascinating and I wonder how the use of serious games for therapy or cognition improvement might be a good start.



[1] EYE MOVEMENTS AND PROBLEM SOLVING: Guiding Attention Guides Thought, Elizabeth R. Grant and Michael J. Spivey
[2] Moving eyes and moving thought: The spatial compatibility between eye movements and cognition, Laura E. Thomas, Alejandro Lleras (or here)
[3] Image: Evil gives, Gapingvoid.com, Hugh Macleod