Methodology

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Short Term Memory in VR
VS.
MALE
FEMALE
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Abstract

• Popular belief has always told us that females
  mulit-task better than males.
• It would seem they would also have the better
  short term memory.
• Would they show this in a Virtual Reality
  environment?

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Introduction

• Goals
• Determine difference in short term memory between
  males and females.
• Motivation
• See if gender affects short term memory.
• Hypothesis of Study
• We hypothesize that female subjects will show a
  better short term memory.

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Background

• Henderson and Hollingworth
• The role of fixation position in detecting scene
  changes across saccades.
• Three factors found to affect detection.
• Visual system delivers veridical representation
  of scene.

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Methodology

• Apparatus
• Stimulus
• Subjects
• Experimental Design
• Procedure
• Analysis

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Apparatus

• A Pentium 4 workstation with a NVIDIA 4600
  graphics card.
• A Head Mounted Display (HMD) binocular eye
  tracker having 640 X 480 resolution per eye with
  separate left and right eye feeds and equipped
  with head phones for audio localization.
• 6 degree-of-freedom head tracking with Ascension
  Flock Of Birds

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Stimulus

• A virtual room with three pictures placed on each
  wall.
• Each wall has a label (LEFT, RIGHT, FRONT, and
  BACK) indicating its position.

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Front Wall
ANDREW DUCHOWSKI
PRADIP SRIMANI
MICHAEL JACKSON
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Back Wall
CARRIE-ANNE MOSS(TRINITY)
BRIAN MALLOY
BILL CLINTON
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Left Wall
GEORGE W. BUSH
MICHAEL JORDAN
TIMOTHY DAVIS
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Right Wall
WAYNE MADISON
KEANU REEVES(NEO)
DAVID BECKHAM
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Subjects

• Three male and three female college students.
• Age varying from 20 to 22 years old.

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Experimental Design

• 2 (Male/Female) X 1 (level of difficulty)
  between-subjects design
• Experimentation included one level of difficulty,
  and every subject went through the test under the
  same level of difficulty.
• Stats will contain data from the eye tracker and
  the program which will denote the gaze points of
  the subjects and information about the gaze
  points which coincide with the position of
  pictures in the virtual world.

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Procedure

• Ask the subject to fill out the pre-run
  questionnaire.
• Questions include whether or not the subjects
  have 20/20 vision, and if not, do they wear
  glasses or contacts.
• Subjects are told they will have one minute to
  observe the virtual room.
• Subjects enter the virtual room for one minute.
• Ask the subject to fill out the post-run
  questionnaire where they will circle the wall
  where they think each picture appeared.

(Left, Right, Front, Back)
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Analysis

• We were able to observe how they explored the
  virtual room by replaying each subjects trial
  run.
• The lower left hand picture was what the viewer
  saw.
• Each picture that the subjects eyes actually
  looked at, is marked with a red line.

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Results
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Accuracy Percentage
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Discussion

• There is almost a 40 percent difference in the
  efficiency of short term memory between the
  sexes.
• Our hypothesis stated that our female subjects
  will prove to have better short term memory than
  our male subjects. This is definitely the case in
  our results.

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Conclusion

• The experiment was a success.
• Our hypothesis was correct.
• We concluded that gender does play a role in the
  usage of short term memory.

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Questions???