Abstract

PESSOA, Candido V. B. B.  and  TOMANARI, Gerson Yukio. Measurement of stimulus control: eye fixations as natural observing responses. Rev. bras. ter. comport. cogn. [online]. 2012, vol.14, n.3, pp. 34-50. ISSN 1517-5545.

Behavior analyses of eye movements frequently present non-conclusive results about discriminative functions of the stimuli produced by these movements in relation to following responses. This paper presents an analysis of the first fixation of the eyes of the participants on each component during a simple, successive discrimination task as indicative of discriminative functions of two stimuli sets. Four undergraduate students were separately submitted to a simple, successive discrimination task in which space bar pressing on a computer keyboard produced points when emitted during presentation of stimuli of one set but not during presentation of stimuli of a second set. After discriminative control of bar pressing was achieved discriminative functions were reverted. Eye movements of participants were tracked during session. Analyses of total frequency, total duration, average duration, and first duration of eye fixations of the participants toward each set of discriminative stimuli were made. Duration of first fixation was more predictive of the different discriminative functions of antecedent stimuli to manual task. Results are discussed in terms of dynamic characteristics of stimuli and of the relevance of eye movements for applied sets.

Keywords : eye movements; fixations; observing response; attention; simple discrimination.

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