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I'M VIPIN VERMA.

MOTOR INDICATORS OF COGNITIVE LOAD: A MOUSE-TRACKING APPROACH

Nov 2018

Presented a poster at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New Orleans, LA.
The study involved finding out if the hand motion can be used to make inferences about cognitive load, and to make predictions about the level of cognitive load.
The supervised classifiers, trained using hand motion data, showed prediction accuracy that is about 20% greater than the chance level (33%) and could predict about 10% ~ 20% of the variance of the cognitive load.

USE OF MOUSE-TRACKING METHODS TO MEASURE COGNITIVE LOAD

Sep 2018

Integrated with computerized education platforms, the mouse-tracking technique could provide an inexpensive and less intrusive tool for assessing cognitive load. The present study examined whether mouse-tracking can quantify changes in cognitive load. Participants performed a dual-task, which required them to perform primary tasks of moving a computer mouse cursor along the vertical and the horizontal axes to a target, and secondary arithmetic tasks designed to impose different levels of cognitive load. Analyses of the mouse-tracking data indicated that slower mean response time and less trajectory deviation were observed when participants were given secondary tasks imposing a greater cognitive load, whereas slower mean response time and greater trajectory deviation were observed when participants moved a cursor toward a smaller-sized target. The cause behind the quantitative difference between the cognitive load effect, and the motor task difficulty (target size) is discussed, as are implications of these results for computerized education platforms.

GIVE AND TAKE IN A MOUSE-TRACKING CHOICE PARADIGM

Nov 2017

Do “gender/race – valence” biases interact with approach- avoidance movements: Giving an object or taking it away?

Developed a mouse tracking application deployed on heroku, to gauge the implicit bias of participants.

Results indicated that the approaching trajectory was modulated by the cursor shape and the gender of target face, whereas avoidance trajectory was modulated only by the cursor shape.

EVALUATING GAMESCAPES AND SIMAPPS AS EFFECTIVE CLASSROOM TEACHING TOOLS

In Press

GameScapes and SimApps, are new narrative and game mechanic influenced tools developed for improving the classroom learning experience for students. In Fall 2015, GameScapes and SimApps were tested with 16 American colleges and universities and 26 members of their faculties to improve learning outcomes in first-year composition classes, many including English as secondary language students, specifically focusing on writing skills and grammar abilities. Several GameScapes and SimApps developed for the course were tested with over 1000 students. Faculty members could select at least two games from a set of 17 such games that would best align with their courses’ learning objectives. Scores earned in student gameplay were converted to points that applied to students’ grades in the courses. This paper presents a complete evaluation of the GameScapes and SimApps that were used by the teachers and students and discusses best practices, classroom observations, learning outcomes and future scalability of this methodology to other courses.