Web pages: What can you see in a single fixation?

Future Directions in Single-Session Youth Mental Health Interventions

The United States spends more money on mental health services than any other country, yet access to effective psychological services remains strikingly low. The need-to-access gap is especially wide among children and adolescents, with up to 80% of youths with mental health needs going without services, and the remainder often receiving insufficient or untested care. Single-session interventions (SSIs) may offer a promising path toward improving accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and completion rates for youth mental health services. SSIs are structured programs that intentionally involve only one visit or encounter with a clinic, provider, or program; they may serve as stand-alone or adjunctive clinical services. A growing body of evidence supports the capacity of SSIs to reduce and prevent youth psychopathology of multiple types. Here, we provide a working definition of SSIs for use in future research and practice; summarize the literature to date on SSIs for child and adolescent mental health; and propose recommendations for the future design, evaluation, and implementation of SSIs across a variety of settings and contexts. We hope that this paper will serve as an actionable research agenda for gauging the full potential of SSIs as a force for youth mental health.

Exploring website gist through rapid serial visual presentation

Background

Users can make judgments about web pages in a glance. Little research has explored what semantic information can be extracted from a web page within a single fixation or what mental representations users have of web pages, but the scene perception literature provides a framework for understanding how viewers can extract and represent diverse semantic information from scenes in a glance. The purpose of this research was (1) to explore whether semantic information about a web page could be extracted within a single fixation and (2) to explore the effects of size and resolution on extracting this information. Using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, Experiment 1 explored whether certain semantic categories of websites (i.e., news, search, shopping, and social networks/blogs) could be detected within a RSVP stream of web page stimuli. Natural scenes, which have been shown to be detectable within a single fixation in the literature, served as a baseline for comparison. Experiment 2 examined the effects of stimulus size and resolution on observers’ ability to detect the presence of website categories using similar methods.

Results

Findings from this research demonstrate that users have conceptual models of websites that allow detection of web pages from a fixation’s worth of stimulus exposure, when provided additional time for processing. For website categories other than search, detection performance decreased significantly when web elements were no longer discernible due to decreases in size and/or resolution. The implications of this research are that website conceptual models rely more on page elements and less on the spatial relationship between these elements.

Conclusions

Participants can detect websites accurately when they were displayed for less than a fixation and when the participants were allowed additional processing time. Subjective comments and stimulus onset asynchrony data suggested that participants likely relied on local features for the detection of website targets for several website categories. This notion was supported when the size and/or resolution of stimuli were decreased to the extent that web elements were indistinguishable. This demonstrates that schemas or conceptualizations of websites provided information sufficient to detect websites from approximately 140 ms of stimulus exposure.