Benjamin T Files

Army Research Laboratory | ALC · Human Research and Engineering Directorate (HRED)

Three-dimensional environmental hazards, such as dangerous chemicals, biological agents, or radiation, may often be invisible to the human eye. Enabling Warfighters and other personnel to navigate potentially dangerous environments safely requires conveying the locations of these hazards: in short, making the invisible visible. Ideally, 3-D hazard...

The Flexible and Live Adaptive Training Tool (FLATT) builds upon the benefits and advantages provided by the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT) (ARL GIFT, 2022) as a third-party assessment engine that enables trainers and researchers (operators) to rapidly prototype and evaluate rulebased, real-time adaptive interventions. Operat...

Information uncertainty is ubiquitous in everyday life, including in domains as diverse as weather forecasts, investments, and health risks. Knowing how to interpret and integrate this uncertain information is vital for making good decisions, but this can be difficult for experts and novices alike. In this study, we examine whether brief, focused p...

Technology is advancing at a rapid and ever-accelerating pace, requiring human users to continually adapt to new interfaces, systems, and capabilities. Some emerging technologies such as advanced artificial intelligence (AI) can even update their capabilities and behaviors in real time, requiring human adaptation on the fly. How can we prepare user...

Conducting behavioral experiments online enables researchers to obtain large sample sizes quickly. Existing tools for online experiments are primarily suited for text and 2-D images, while bringing 3-D virtual environment experiences to the web for research remains a challenge. This technical note describes a process to present complex 3-D virtual...

Adaptive training adjusts a training task with the goal of improving learning outcomes. Adaptive training has been shown to improve human performance in attention, working memory capacity, and motor control tasks. Additionally, correlations have been observed between neural EEG spectral features (4–13 Hz) and the performance of some cognitive tasks...

Need for cognition (NFC) and regulatory focus (RF) are important variables with individual differences relevant to motivation and goal pursuit. These constructs are widely used in the literature, often separately; no work has simultaneously examined the need for cognition scale (NCS) and Lockwood’s general regulatory focus measure (GRFM). Here, we...

Error-related negativity (ERN), an electroencephalogram (EEG) component following an erroneous response, has been associated with the subjective motivational relevance of error commission. A smaller EEG event, the correct response negativity (CRN), occurs after a correct response. It is unclear why correct behavior evokes a neural response similar...

Virtual environments (VEs) afford learners the ability to train in simulated versions of real-world environments or in novel environments to attain or refine skills. Performance within these training tasks are likely to benefit from appropriate feedback and assessments. As the usefulness of VEs and adaptive training technology become more valuable,...

Teaching and training are increasingly moving from real world venues to computerized environments, with human instructors often being replaced or joined by virtual pedagogical agents. While system fidelity and immersive properties of virtual learning environments are frequently discussed in the literature, less often addressed is the fidelity of th...

Virtual reality and immersive technologies are used in a variety of learning and training applications. However, higher levels of immersion do not always improve learning. The mixed results in the literature may partly arise from the use of between-subjects designs, insufficient time intervals between sessions in within-subjects designs, and/or ove...

Understanding quantified uncertainty through efficient visualization techniques is becoming increasingly important for the successful teaming of human and intelligent agents across many domains. For humans to make effective, well-informed decisions, visualizations must maximize the amount of critical information communicated in a way that complexit...

The effects of immersive technology on learning have been mixed. It is therefore important to determine the factors that affect when and why immersive technologies are and are not effective. One psychological construct proposed to explain why higher levels of immersive technology may lead to better learning compared to lower immersion is presence,...

We introduce a novel framework for creating and evaluating multiple virtual reality environments (VEs) that are naturalistic and similar in navigational complexity. We developed this framework in support of a spatial-learning study using a within-subjects design. We generated three interior environments and used graph-theoretic methods to ensure si...

Evaluating performance on spatial-related training and tasks such as search and rescue necessitates ways of measuring spatial knowledge. While most spatial assessments have straightforward implementations, directional bearings present a challenge in administration and preprocessing. In paper and pencil assessments, scoring and inputting these data...

Spatial navigation and spatial learning are important skills with implications for many different fields, and can be trained in Virtual Environments (VEs). Research in these areas presents a critical challenge: how to best design tests of knowledge transfer to measure learning from the VEs. Additionally, spatial learning tasks and VEs can be implem...

Information framing can be critical to the impact of information and can affect individuals differently. One contributing factor is a person’s regulatory focus, which describes their focus on achieving gains vs. avoiding losses. We hypothesized that alignment between individual regulatory focus and the framing of performance feedback as either gain...

This study alters various exemplar presentation parameters to determine their effects on human online category learning for a future system that combines humans and computer vision (CV). Online category learning is necessary in this system because we envision that humans will need to provide input to assist CV modules in determining category labels...

Information framing can be critical to the impact of information and can affect individuals differently. One contributing factor is a person's regulatory focus, which describes their focus on achieving gains or avoiding losses. We hypothesized that alignment between individual regulatory focus and the framing of performance feedback as either gain...

In human-agent teams, communications are frequently limited by how quickly the human component can deliver information to the computer-based agents. Treating the human as a sensor can help relax this limitation. As an instance of this, the rapid serial visual presentation target-detection paradigm provides a fast lane for human target-detection inf...

Individuals differ in their reactions to performance-based feedback. To maximize the effectiveness of feedback interventions, learner models should account for these individual differences. Here, we examined the relationship between a candidate trait, Regulatory Focus (RF), and the effect of feedback framed as point losses, framed as point gains, o...

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Global field power is a valuable summary of multi-channel electroencephalography data. However, global field power is biased by the noise typical of electroencephalography experiments, so comparisons of global field power on data with unequal noise are invalid. Here, we demonstrate the relationship between the number of trials that contribute to a...

In support of achieving better performance on autonomous mapping and exploration tasks by incorporating human input, we seek here to first characterize humans’ ability to recognize locations from limited visual information. Such a characterization is critical to the design of a human-in-the-loop system faced with deciding whether and when human inp...

Background: Estimating target detection performance in the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) target detection paradigm can be challenging when the inter-stimulus interval is small relative to the variability in human response time. The challenge arises because assigning a particular response to the correct image cannot be done with certainty...

From phonetic features to connected discourse, every level of psycholinguistic structure including prosody can be perceived through viewing the talking face. Yet a longstanding notion in the literature is that visual speech perceptual categories comprise groups of phonemes (referred to as visemes), such as /p, b, m/ and /f, v/, whose internal struc...

Achiasma is a congenital condition in which the optic chiasm does not develop. Consequently, all retinal efferents from each eye project only to the respective ipsilateral cerebral hemisphere. In the early visual cortex (EVC), the representation for the left and right visual hemifield are "folded" onto each other such that each small patch in EVC h...

A small number of humans are born without an optic chiasm. In these individuals, the entire visual field is represented in both cerebral hemispheres, unlike the contralateral organization in typically developed controls. We investigated the representation of visual and somatosensory space in the superior colliculus (SC) of a subject (age 23) with c...

Background / Purpose: A few humans are born without an optic chiasm. In such subjects, both left and right visual hemifields are represented bilaterally in the visual cortex. Here, we investigated the representation of visual space on the superior colliculus (SC) of an achiasmatic subject, and its relationship to the SC representation of somatose...

The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), deriving from the brain's response to stimulus deviance, is thought to be generated by the cortex that represents the stimulus. The vMMN response to visual speech stimuli was used in a study of the lateralization of visual speech processing. Previous research suggested that the right posterior temporal cortex...

(A) ERP montage for “zha,” in the far context. Group mean ERPs for “zha” as standard in blocks with “fa” as deviant, and “zha” as deviant in blocks with “fa” as standard. (B) ERP montage for “zha,” in the near context. Group mean ERPs for “zha” as standard in blocks with “ta” as deviant, and “zha” as deviant in blocks with “ta” as standard. Each su...

(A) ERP montage for “fa,” in the far context. Group mean ERPs for “fa” as standard in blocks with “zha” as deviant and “fa” as deviant in blocks with “zha” as a standard. (B) ERP montage for “ta,” in the near context. Group mean ERPs for “ta” as standard in blocks with “zha” as deviant and “ta” as deviant in blocks with “zha” as standard. The light...

Source images for “ta” near vMMN. Images show the depth-weighted minimum norm estimate of dipole source strength constrained to the surface of the cortex using a boundary element forward model and a generic anatomical model at 20-ms intervals from 0 to 500 ms post-deviation onset. Images are thresholded at 20 pA·m. Foci of activity are scattered an...

Source images for “fa” far vMMN. Images show the depth-weighted minimum norm estimate of dipole source strength constrained to the surface of the cortex using a boundary element forward model and a generic anatomical model at 20-ms intervals from 0 to 500 ms post-deviation onset. Images are thresholded at 20 pA·m. Strong focal activity occurs in ri...

Source images for “zha” near vMMN. Images show the depth-weighted minimum norm estimate of dipole source strength constrained to the surface of the cortex using a boundary element forward model and a generic anatomical model at 20-ms intervals from 0 to 500 ms post-deviation onset. Images are thresholded at 20 pA·m. Strong activity in right posteri...

Speech perception can be viewed as an auditory process, but lipreading suggests that speech perception is not modality-specific. Extracting and representing contrastive information is a fundamental step in any process involving categorization, such as speech perception, so investigating the dissimilarity structures underlying visual speech percepti...

In order to understand visual speech perception (a.k.a. lipreading or speechreading) and its neural underpinnings, we need a theory about what is the functional visual speech stimulus. Previous research suggests that the perceptual dissimilarity of visual speech syllables is related to a physical measure of the dissimilarity of utterances of those...

Vision appears to be the dominant influence when we interpret motion in the world around us, but information from the other senses can help to interpret an otherwise ambiguous stimulus. An example of this is the bounce/stream illusion. The bounce/stream illusion arises in the context of an ambiguous visual display in which two identical objects app...