Tim J Smith

• BSc Hons, PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of the Arts London

Importance Toddler screen time has been associated with poorer sleep and differences in attention. Understanding the causal impact of screen time on early development is of the highest importance. Objective To test (1) the feasibility of the 7-week parent-administered screen time intervention (PASTI) in toddlers (aged 16-30 months) who have screen...

Background The Social Motivation Theory proposes that social reward processing differences underlie autism. However, low social motivation has also been linked to higher anxiety. Given the co‐occurrence between autism and anxiety, it is possible that anxiety drives the association between social motivation and autistic characteristics. This study t...

Attention to emotional signals conveyed by others is critical for gleaning information about potential social partners and the larger social context. Children appear to detect social threats (e.g., angry faces) faster than non‐threatening social signals (e.g., neutral faces). However, methods that rely on behavioral responses alone are limited in i...

Sharing experiences with others is an important part of everyday life. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) promises to simulate these experiences. However, whether IVR elicits a similar level of social presence as measured in the real world is unclear. It is also uncertain whether AI-driven virtual humans (agents) can elicit a similar level of meaningf...

Sharing experiences with others is an important part of everyday life. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) promises to simulate these experiences. However, whether IVR elicits a similar level of social presence as measured in the real world is unclear. It is also uncertain whether AI-driven virtual humans (agents) can elicit a similar level of meaningf...

As in real life, cinema viewers rely on spontaneous theory of mind (SToM) to interpret characters' mental states. Thus, analyzing cinematic structures offers a unique opportunity to examine ecologically valid sociocognitive processes. We conducted a proof-of-concept study (N = 42) to explore how SToM inferences impact film event comprehension in dr...

Background Although autism and callous‐unemotional (CU) traits are distinct conditions, both are associated with difficulties in emotion recognition. However, it is unknown whether the emotion recognition difficulties characteristic of autism and CU traits are driven by comparable underpinning mechanisms. Methods We tested whether cueing to the ey...

The recent increase in children's use of digital media, both TV and touchscreen devices (e.g., tablets and smartphones), has been associated with developmental differences in Executive Functions (EF). It has been hypothesised that early exposure to attention-commanding and contingent stimulation provided by touchscreens may increase reliance on bot...

The onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has shifted most of the world toward remote working and education. As the world continues to embrace remote virtual communication in the post-COVID-19 era, it is crucial to investigate the impacts of online social copresence on cognitive performance. The present study investigated how the online vide...

How do we understand the experiences of characters in a movie? Similar to real life, viewers attribute mental states to characters through a process known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Filmmakers commonly use Dramatic Irony, a narrative device where the audience knows something that at least one characters does not. From a social neuroscience perspectiv...

Evidence from multiple empirical studies suggests children’s Executive Functions are depleted immediately after viewing some types of TV content but not others. Correlational evidence suggests any such effects may be most problematic during the pre-school years. To establish whether “screen-time” is developmentally appropriate at this age we believ...

Low inhibitory control (IC) is sometimes associated with enhanced problem-solving amongst adults, yet for young children high IC is primarily framed as inherently better than low IC. Here, we explore associations between IC and performance on a novel problem-solving task, amongst 102 English 2- and 3-year-olds (Study 1) and 84 Swedish children, see...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is first diagnosed during middle childhood, when patterns of difficulty are often established. Pre-emptive approaches that strengthen developing cognitive systems could offer an alternative to post-diagnostic interventions. This proof-of-concept randomised controlled trial (RCT) tested whether compute...

Cross-cultural psychologists have widely discussed “gaze avoidance” as a sociocultural norm to describe reduced mutual gaze in East Asians (EAs) compared to Western Caucasians (WCs). Supportive evidence is primarily based on self-reports and video recordings of face-to-face interactions, but more objective techniques that can investigate the micro-...

Childhood screen time is associated with both attentional difficulties (for television viewing) and benefits (in action video gamers), but few studies have investigated today’s pervasive touchscreen devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets), which combine salient features, interactive content, and accessibility from toddlerhood (a peak period of cogni...

Objective Atypical emotion recognition (ER) is characteristic of children with high callous unemotional (CU) traits. The current study aims to 1) replicate studies showing ER difficulties for static faces in relation to high CU-traits; 2) test whether ER difficulties remain when more naturalistic dynamic stimuli are used; 3) test whether ER perform...

The impact of the digital world on the developing mind is often debated but rarely evidenced. While TV viewing has previously been associated with attentional impairments, video gaming has been linked to enhanced visual attention. Touchscreen devices offer young children the potential for both watching videos and interactive use (i.e., playing game...

This paper examines the educational efficacy of a learning environment in which children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) engage in social interactions with an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual agent and where a human practitioner acts in support of the interactions. A multi-site intervention study in schools across the UK was co...

Book synopsis: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development remains the most authoritative and accessible account of all aspects of child development. Written by an international team of experts, its comprehensive coverage includes everything from prenatal development to adolescence, pediatrics, theories and research methods, physical developmen...

The goal of this article is to investigate the unexplored mechanisms underlying the development of saccadic control in infancy by determining the generalizability and potential limitations of extending the CRISP theoretical framework and computational model of fixation durations (FDs) in adult scene-viewing to infants. The CRISP model was used to i...

Traditional screen time (e.g. TV and videogaming) has been linked to sleep problems and poorer developmental outcomes in children. With the advent of portable touchscreen devices, this association may be extending down in age to disrupt the sleep of infants and toddlers, an age when sleep is essential for cognitive development. However, this associ...

Touchscreen technologies provide an intuitive and attractive source of sensory/cognitive stimulation for young children. Despite fears that usage may have a negative impact on toddlers’ cognitive development, empirical evidence is lacking. The current study presents results from the UK Toddler Attentional Behaviours and LEarning with Touchscreens (...

During visual search, target representations (attentional templates) control the allocation of attention to template-matching objects. The activation of new attentional templates can be prompted by verbal or pictorial target specifications. We measured the N2pc component of the ERP as a temporal marker of attentional target selection to determine t...

This paper modifies the DBSCAN algorithm to identify fixations and saccades. This method combines advantages from dispersion-based algorithms, such as resilience to noise and intuitive fixational structure, and from velocity-based algorithms, such as the ability to deal appropriately with smooth pursuit (SP) movements.

Objective: Information foraging is atypical in both autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and ADHD; however, while ASD is associated with restricted exploration and preference for sameness, ADHD is characterized by hyperactivity and increased novelty seeking. Here, we ask whether similar biases are present in visual foraging in younger siblings of child...

Recently it was shown that individual differences in attention style in infants are associated with childhood effortful control, surgency, and hyperactivity-inattention. Here we investigated whether effortful control, surgency and behavioral problems in childhood can be predicted even earlier, from individual differences in newborns’ average durati...

Eye tracking is a research tool that has great potential for advancing our understanding of how we watch movies. Questions such as how differences in the movie influences where we look and how individual differences between viewers alters what we see can be operationalised and empirically tested using a variety of eye tracking measures. This specia...

Little is known about how spontaneous attentional deployment differs on a millisecond-level scale in the early development of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We measured fine-grained eye movement patterns in 6-to 9-month-old infants at high or low familial risk (HR/LR) of ASD while they viewed static images. We observed shorter fixation durations...

Little is known about how spontaneous attentional deployment differs on a millisecond-level scale in the early development of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We measured fine-grained eye movement patterns in 6-to 9-month-old infants at high or low familial risk (HR/LR) of ASD while they viewed static images. We observed shorter fixation durations...

Magicians utilize many techniques for misdirecting audience attention away from the secret sleight of a trick. One technique is to ask an audience member to participate in a trick either physically by asking them to choose a card or cognitively by having them keep track of a card. While such audience participation is an established part of most mag...

Visual search is controlled by representations of target objects (attentional templates). Such templates are often activated in response to verbal descriptions of search targets, but it is unclear whether search can be guided effectively by such verbal cues. We measured ERPs to track the activation of attentional templates for new target objects de...

Saccade latencies are longer prior to an eye movement to a recently fixated location than to control locations, a phenomenon known as oculomotor inhibition of return (O-IOR). There are theoretical reasons to expect that O-IOR would vary in magnitude across different eye movement tasks, but previous studies have produced contradictory evidence. Howe...

Representations of current target objects (attentional templates) guide attentional selection in visual search. To find out how such templates are acquired during object learning, we employed a cueing procedure. A word cue (e.g., "trousers") informed participants about the target object for a series of visual search displays. Each cue was followed...

To compare the speed and efficiency of item-based and category-based attentional control during visual search for real-world objects, we measured N2pc components as electrophysiological markers of attentional target selection. In different blocks, participants searched for 1 or 2 specific target objects or for any object in a target category (items...

Individual differences in fixation duration are considered a reliable measure of attentional control in adults. However, the degree to which individual differences in fixation duration in infancy (0–12 months) relate to temperament and behavior in childhood is largely unknown. In the present study, data were examined from 120 infants (mean age = 7....

This paper presents ECHOES, a serious game built to help young children with autism spectrum conditions practice social communication skills. We focus on the design and implementation of the interactive learning activities, which take place in a two-dimensional sensory garden, and the autonomous virtual agent, which acts as a credible social partne...

Younger brains are noisier information processing systems; this means that information for younger individuals has to allow clearer differentiation between those aspects that are required for the processing task in hand (the ‘signal’) and those that are not (the ‘noise’). We compared toddler-directed and adult-directed TV programmes (TotTV/ATV). We...

Supplementary Methods: Further details of fixation duration parsing. Further details of tonic pupil parsing. Data S2. Supplementary Results: Fixation durations - comparison with previously reported infant and adult fixation durations. Figure S1. Sample raw data-plots of tonic pupil data. Figure S2. Scatterplot showing the zero-order correlations re...

Fixation durations (FD) have been used widely as a measurement of information processing and attention. However, issues like data quality can seriously influence the accuracy of the fixation detection methods and, thus, affect the validity of our results (Holmqvist, Nyström, & Mulvey, 2012). This is crucial when studying special populations such as...

Little research hitherto has examined how individual differences in attention, as assessed using standard experimental paradigms, relate to individual differences in how attention is spontaneously allocated in more naturalistic contexts. Here, we analyzed the time intervals between refoveating eye movements (fixation durations) while typically deve...

Change blindness is a failure to detect changes if the change occurs during a mask or distraction. Without distraction, it is assumed that the visual transients associated with the change will automatically capture attention (exogenous control), leading to detection. However, visual transients are a defining feature of naturalistic dynamic scenes....

Background / Purpose: GraFIX is a new method and software to parse fixations in low and high quality eye-tracking data. Main conclusion: We compared GraFIX with previous automatic and hand-coding methods and we concluded that the present technique provides more reliable and accurate results.

We investigate an approach to the artistic stylization of photographic images and videos that uses an understanding of the role of abstract representations in art and perception. We first learn a database of representations from a corpus of images or image sequences. Using this database, our approach synthesizes a target image or video by matching...

Understanding category structure helps us make sense of the world, but little is known about how we use our knowledge about object categories during search. This study used event-related potential (ERP) markers of attentional object selection to investigate differences between search for one or two specific visual objects and category-based search,...

Recent evidence of eye-movement behavior during dynamic scene viewing has shown that low-level visual features such as motion are of greater magnitude and contrast at fixation than at non-fixated locations. However, it is still unclear if the features at fixation are causal in attracting attention or merely correlated with higher-level features suc...

Does viewing task influence gaze during dynamic scene viewing? Research into the factors influencing gaze allocation during free viewing of dynamic scenes has reported that the gaze of multiple viewers clusters around points of high motion (attentional synchrony), suggesting that gaze may be primarily under exogenous control. However, the influence...

Visual search is often guided by top–down attentional templates that specify target-defining features. But search can also occur at the level of object categories. We measured the N2pc component, a marker of attentional target selection, in two visual search experiments where targets were defined either categorically (e.g., any letter) or at the it...

This paper introduces the SHARE-IT project, which leverages serious games paradigm to motivate and engage children with autism diagnosis in interactive activities, based on the state-of-the-art autism intervention practices. The aim of SHARE-IT is to formulate, in partnership with schools, parents and industry, the requirements for a robust, intell...

We investigate an approach to the artistic stylization of photographic images and videos that uses an understanding of the role of abstract representations in art and perception. We first learn a database of representations from a corpus of images or image sequences. Using this database, our approach synthesizes a target image or video by matching...

What controls gaze allocation during dynamic face perception? We monitored participants' eye movements while they watched videos featuring close-ups of pedestrians engaged in interviews. Contrary to previous findings using static displays, we observed no general preference to fixate eyes. Instead, gaze was dynamically directed to the eyes, nose, or...

We present the design and implementation of an autonomous virtual agent that acts as a credible social partner for children with Autism Spectrum Conditions and supports them in acquiring social communication skills. The agent's design is based on principles of best autism practice and input from users. Initial experimental results on the efficacy o...

Our perception of the visual world is fallible. Unattended objects may change without us noticing as long as the change does not capture attention ( change blindness). However, it is often assumed that changes to a fixated object will be noticed if it is attended. In this experiment we demonstrate that participants fail to detect a change in identi...

Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are known to have different patterns of visual attention compared to Neuro-typical (NT) adults in naturalistic social scenes. However, these differences are hard to reproduce in the lab using sparse/static stimuli. How do ASD adults attend to socially relevant information in dynamic scenes and what are the...

Background / Purpose: Visual search is often guided by top-down attentional templates that specify target-defining features. However, search can also occur at the level of object categories. We measured the N2pc component, a marker of attentional target selection, in a visual search task using familiar and novel targets. Main conclusion: We sh...

Edited moving images entertain, inform, and coerce us throughout our daily lives, yet until recently, the way people perceive movies has received little psychological attention. We review the history of empirical investigations into movie perception and the recent explosion of new research on the subject using methods such as behavioral experiments...

We present an interdisciplinary methodology for designing interactive technology for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In line with many other researchers in the field, we believe that the key to developing technology in this context is to embrace perspectives from diverse disciplines to arrive at a methodology that delivers sati...

Where does one attend when viewing dynamic scenes? Research into the factors influencing gaze allocation during free-viewing of dynamic scenes have reported that motion is highly predictive of gaze location (Mital, Smith, Hill, & Henderson, 2010; Cog.Comp.). However, it is currently unknown whether this is due to exogenous control of attention or d...

Oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR) is believed to facilitate scene scanning by decreasing the probability that gaze will return to a previously fixated location. This "foraging" hypothesis was tested during scene search and in response to sudden-onset probes at the immediately previous (one-back) fixation location. The latencies of saccades land...

Where does one attend when viewing dynamic scenes? Research into the factors influencing gaze location during static scene viewing have reported that low-level visual features contribute very little to gaze location especially when opposed by high-level factors such as viewing task. However, the inclusion of transient features such as motion in dyn...

Inhibition of Return (IOR) is a difficulty in processing stimuli presented at recently attended locations. IOR is widely believed to facilitate foraging of a visual scene by decreasing the probability that gaze will return to previously fixated locations. However, there is a lack of clear evidence in support of the foraging facilitator hypothesis d...

Two important aspects of eye-movement control during scene viewing are where fixations tend to be directed (fixation position), and how long they typically remain there (fixation duration). While substantial behavioral and computational research has been devoted to fixation positions in scenes, relatively little is known about the mechanisms that c...

Eye-movement control during scene viewing can be represented as a series of individual decisions about where and when to move the eyes. While substantial behavioral and computational research has been devoted to investigating the placement of fixations in scenes, relatively little is known about the mechanisms that control fixation durations. Here,...

Book synopsis: Film (cinema) perception refers to the sensory and cognitive processes employed when viewing scenes, events, and narratives presented in edited moving images. Dynamic visual media such as film and television have increasingly become an integral part of our everyday lives. Understanding how our perceptual system deals with the differ...

Inhibition of Return (IOR) is a delay in initiating attentional shifts to previously attended locations. It is believed to facilitate attentional exploration of a scene. Computational models of attention have implemented IOR as a simple mechanism for driving attention through a scene. However, evidence for IOR during scene viewing is inconclusive....

Recent research on eye movements during scene viewing has focused on where the eyes fixate. But eye fixations also differ in their durations. Here we investigated whether fixation durations in scene viewing are under the direct and immediate control of the current visual input. In two scene memorization and one visual search experiments, the scene...

We investigated the relationship between visual clutter and visual search in real-world scenes. Specifically, we investigated whether visual clutter, indexed by feature congestion, sub-band entropy, and edge density, correlates with search performance as assessed both by traditional behavioral measures (response time and error rate) and by eye move...

Recent articles calling for a scientific study of magic have been the subject of widespread interest. This article considers the topic from a broader perspective and argues that to engage in a science of magic, in any meaningful sense, is misguided. It argues that those who have called for a scientific theory of magic have failed to explain either...

Although we experience the visual world as a continuous, richly detailed space we often fail to notice large and significant changes. Such change blindness has been demonstrated for local object changes and changes to the visual form of whole images, however it is assumed that total changes from one image to another would be easily detected. Film e...

The amount of time viewers could process a scene during eye fixations was varied by a mask that appeared at a certain point in each eye fixation. The scene did not reappear until the viewer made an eye movement. The main finding in the studies was that in order to normally process a scene, viewers needed to see the scene for at least 150 ms during...

When multiple viewers attend to the same static naturalistic scene there is a high degree of agreement in terms of the regions viewers attend to but no synchronization of when they attend there. By comparison, real-world scenes are rich with temporally-defined visual events such as motion which have the potential to involuntarily capture attention....

LeActiveMath (Language-Enhanced, User-Adaptive, Interactive eLearning for Mathematics) is an interdisciplinary European effort that develops an internationalized Web-based intelligent e-Learning system for mathematics that can be used in high school and university as well as for self study. The many technological innovations serve a moderate constr...

The intention of most film editing is to create the impression of continuous action (“continuity”) by presenting discontinuous visual information. The techniques used to achieve this, the continuity editing rules, are well established yet there exists no understanding of their cognitive foundations. This thesis attempts to correct this oversight by...

Human observers segment ongoing activities into events that are reliable across observers [Newtson and Engquist 1976]. Segments can be small ("fine") or large ("coarse") with clusters of fine-grained segments relating hierarchically to coarse segments. Segmentation behaviour occurs even without instruction indicated by neural activity in the Medial...

With the increasing reliance on computers for the automatic processing of information a new method is needed for editing mathematical formulae. We are used to WYSIWYG editors that produce beautiful presentations of formulae and store the typesetting primitives rather than the meaning of the formulas. However, new services such as database searching...

LeActiveMath (Language-Enhanced, User-Adaptive, Interactive eLearning for Mathematics) is an interdisciplinary European effort that develops an internationalized Web-based intelligent e-Learning system for mathematics that can be used in high school and university as well as for self study. The many technological innovations serve a moderate constr...