Eye tracking: empirical foundations for a minimal reporting guideline.

In this paper, we present a review of how the various aspects of any study using an eye tracker (such as the instrument, methodology, environment, participant, etc.) affect the quality of the recorded eye-tracking data and the obtained eye-movement and gaze measures. We take this review to represent the empirical foundation for reporting guidelines of any study involving an eye tracker. We compare this empirical foundation to five existing reporting guidelines and to a database of 207 published eye-tracking studies. We find that reporting guidelines vary substantially and do not match with actual reporting practices. We end by deriving a minimal, flexible reporting guideline based on empirical research (Section "An empirically based minimal reporting guideline").

The Validity of Physiological Measures to Identify Differences in Intrinsic Cognitive Load.

A sample of 33 experiments was extracted from the Web-of-Science database over a 5-year period (2016-2020) that used physiological measures to measure intrinsic cognitive load. Only studies that required participants to solve tasks of varying complexities using a within-subjects design were included. The sample identified a number of different physiological measures obtained by recording signals from four main body categories (heart and lungs, eyes, skin, and brain), as well as subjective measures. The overall validity of the measures was assessed by examining construct validity and sensitivity. It was found that the vast majority of physiological measures had some level of validity, but varied considerably in sensitivity to detect subtle changes in intrinsic cognitive load. Validity was also influenced by the type of task. Eye-measures were found to be the most sensitive followed by the heart and lungs, skin, and brain. However, subjective measures had the highest levels of validity. It is concluded that a combination of physiological and subjective measures is most effective in detecting changes in intrinsic cognitive load.

The medical pause: Importance, processes and training.

Research has shown that taking 'timeouts' in medical practice improves performance and patient safety. However, the benefits of taking timeouts, or pausing, are not sufficiently acknowledged in workplaces and training programmes. To promote this acknowledgement, we suggest a systematic conceptualisation of the medical pause, focusing on its importance, processes and implementation in training programmes. By employing insights from educational and cognitive psychology, we first identified pausing as an important skill to interrupt negative momentum and bolster learning. Subsequently, we categorised constituent cognitive processes for pausing skills into two phases: the decision-making phase (determining when and how to take pauses) and the executive phase (applying relaxation or reflection during pauses). We present a model that describes how relaxation and reflection during pauses can optimise cognitive load in performance. Several strategies to implement pause training in medical curricula are proposed: intertwining pause training with training of primary skills, providing second-order scaffolding through shared control and employing auxiliary tools such as computer-based simulations with a pause function.