Academic literature on the topic 'Insight, problem solving, attention, eye movements'

Learning fractions is notoriously difficult, yet critically important to mathematical and general academic achievement. Eye-tracking studies are beginning to characterize the strategies that adults use when comparing fractions, but we know relatively little about the strategies used by children. We used eye-tracking to analyze how novice children and mathematically-proficient adults approached a well-studied fraction comparison paradigm. Specifically, eye-tracking can provide insights into the nature of differences: whether they are quantitative—reflecting differences in efficiency—or qualitative—reflecting a fundamentally different approach. We found that children who had acquired the basic fraction rules made more eye movements than did either adults or less proficient children, suggesting a thorough but inefficient problem solving approach. Additionally, correct responses were associated with normative gaze patterns, regardless of age or proficiency levels. However, children paid more attention to irrelevant numerical relationships on conditions that were conceptually difficult. An exploratory analysis points to the possibility that children on the verge of making a conceptual leap attend to the relevant relationships even when they respond incorrectly. These findings indicate the potential of eye-tracking methodology to better characterize the behavior associated with different levels of fraction proficiency, as well as to provide insights for educators regarding how to best support novices at different levels of conceptual development.

TThe paper focuses on the issue of research methods in studying insight. Since the process of insight is quite difficult to verbalize, researchers are presented with the methodological challenge of its objectifica- tion. One of the possible methods is the analysis of gnostic actions as components of a single integrated system of perceptive and thinking activity aimed at problem solving. The paper analyzes past and present periods in the explorations of insight with this method and suggests that eye tracking in problem solving is the most perspective technology. It reviews the studies of G. Knoblich, J. Ellis, E, Grant and M. Spivey, L. Thomas and A. Lleras, D. Kahneman, J.T. Wang and others. The paper compares various characteristics of eye movements and their content and discusses perspectives for the study on insight using the method of eye movement tracking, that is, testing the theoretical assumptions concerning the mechanisms of insight in problem solving and revealing the processes underlying insight.

The results of two experiments, in which participants solved constructive tasks of the puzzle type, are reported. The tasks were solved by two partners who shared the same visual environment hut whose knowledge of the situation and ability to change it to reach a solution were different. One of the partners — the "expert" — knew the solution in detail but had no means of acting on this information. The second partner — the "novice " — could act to achieve the goal, but knew very little about the solution. The partners were free to communicate verbally. In one third of the trials of the first experiment, in addition to verbal communication, the eye fixations of the expert were projected onto the working space of the novice. In another condition the expert could use a mouse to show the novice relevant parts of the task configuration. Both methods of facilitating the 'joint attention' state of the partners improved their performance. The nature of the dialogues as well as the parameters of the eye movements changed. In the second experiment the direction of the gaze-position data transfer was reversed, from the novice to the expert. This also led to a significant increase in the efficiency of the distributed problem solving.

The eye movements of expert players trying to solve a chess problem show that the first idea that comes to mind directs attention toward sources of information consistent with it and away from inconsistent information. This bias continues unconsciously even when players believe they are looking for alternatives. The result is that alternatives to the first idea are ignored. This mechanism for biasing attention ensures a speedy response in familiar situations, but it can lead to errors when the first thought that comes to mind is not appropriate. We propose that this mechanism is the source of many cognitive biases, from phenomena in problem solving and reasoning to perceptual errors and failures in memory.

Background. Professional experience is one of the most discussed problems in modern labor psychology. Researchers are trying to expose and describe the system of cognitive and metacognitive skills and abilities, which gives an advantage to experienced professionals. However, there is still a sufficient number of contradictions and unexplored aspects. The aim of the study is to identify specific features of problem solving by chemists at different levels of professional experience by analyzing performance indicators and eye movements. Techniques and sampling. The pilot study involved 35 experts and novices in the field of chemistry. They were asked to read descriptions, find errors and fill in gaps in chemical process diagrams. The tasks were based on technological regulations for the production of chemical products. We recorded the run time, errors and indicators of eye movements with the SMI Hi-Speed contactless video recording system with a 1200 Hz frequency. The results showed that the run time and the number of errors were significantly lower for experts than for novices. In addition, the two groups featured significant differences in the average duration of blinking, indicating a higher emotional stress among novices. Other eye movement differences demonstrated that experts tend to favor focal type of cognitive processing. This is revealed in longer fixations, short and slow saccades. Also, the experts were characterized by an uneven distribution of attention and cognitive efforts relative to different parts of the task and by a smaller number of transitions between them. The general analysis showed that experts, solving problems, rely more on mental representations and previous knowledge, while novices are guided by the information presented on the slides. Conclusions. The data demonstrate the superiority of experts in solving chemical problems and reveal the cognitive structure of professional experience.

Considers the influence of the degree of extraversion on the perception of digital information by aviation operators. The analysis of the results of solving the Schulte tables by the test subjects on the NS-Psychotest hardware complex based on the recording of the eye track, performed using a stationary eye tracking device RED250mobile eye tracking device was carried out. While performing the search function, the number of saccadic movements, their amplitude, and the search time for a given digital value were registered. It has been revealed, that introverts during realization eyes search function perform less saccadic movements and spend less time on it than extraverts do. Significant differences have been found during resolving search tasks depending on degree of extraversion. Some interconnections of extension the latent period of the saccade with complication of solving process the cognitive problem were also found. It was found out, that increase in speed of saccadic movements of eyes leads to low efficiency of results of search task execution. Results of conducted research emphasize value of individual approach to medical flight service taking into account psychological features of flight crew in conditions of rapid progress in aviation technologies and means of visualisation of flight information. The obtained data reveal some features of information perception by operators of complex ergatic systems, the study of which in the future will help to maintain the reserves of attention in a continuous stream of incoming data, and thereby reduce the load on the visual analyzer and increase the reliability of professional activities of flight crew.

Abstract Mobile eye-tracking research has provided evidence both on teachers' visual attention in relation to their intentions and on teachers’ student-centred gaze patterns. However, the importance of a teacher’s eye-movements when giving instructions is unexplored. In this study we used mobile eye-tracking to investigate six teachers’ gaze patterns when they are giving task instructions for a geometry problem in four different phases of a mathematical problem-solving lesson. We analysed the teachers’ eye-tracking data, their verbal data, and classroom video recordings. Our paper brings forth a novel interpretative lens for teacher’s pedagogical intentions communicated by gaze during teacher-led moments such as when introducing new tasks, reorganizing the social structures of students for collaboration, and lesson wrap-ups. A change in the students’ task changes teachers’ gaze patterns, which may indicate a change in teacher’s pedagogical intention. We found that teachers gazed at students throughout the lesson, whereas teachers’ focus was at task-related targets during collaborative instruction-giving more than during the introductory and reflective task instructions. Hence, we suggest two previously not detected gaze types: contextualizing gaze for task readiness and collaborative gaze for task focus to contribute to the present discussion on teacher gaze

Processing numbers induces shifts of spatial attention in probe detection tasks, with small numbers orienting attention to the left and large numbers to the right side of space. This has been interpreted as supporting the concept of a mental number line with number magnitudes ranging from left to right, from small to large numbers. Recently, the investigation of this spatial-numerical link has been extended to mental arithmetic with the hypothesis that solving addition or subtraction problems might induce attentional displacements, rightward or leftward, respectively. At the neurofunctional level, the activations elicited by the solving of additions have been shown to resemble those induced by rightward eye movements. However, the possible behavioural counterpart of these activations has not yet been observed. Here, we investigated overt attentional shifts with a target detection task primed by addition and subtraction problems (2-digit ± 1-digit operands) in participants whose gaze orientation was recorded during the presentation of the problems and while calculating. No evidence of early overt attentional shifts was observed while participants were hearing the first operand, the operator or the second operand, but they shifted their gaze towards the right during the solving step of addition problems. These results show that gaze shifts related to arithmetic problem solving are elicited during the solving procedure and suggest that their functional role is to access, from the first operand, the representation of the result.

The interpretation of graphs plays a pivotal role in education because it is relevant for understanding and representing data and comprehending concepts in various domains. Accordingly, many studies examine students’ gaze behavior by comparing different levels of expertise when interpreting graphs. This literature review presents an overview of 32 articles comparing the gaze behavior of experts and non-experts during problem-solving and learning with graphs up to January 2022. Most studies analyzed students’ dwell time, fixation duration, and fixation count on macro- and meso-, as well as on micro-level areas of interest. Experts seemed to pay more attention to relevant parts of the graph and less to irrelevant parts of a graph, in line with the information-reduction hypothesis. Experts also made more integrative eye movements within a graph in terms of dynamic metrics. However, the determination of expertise is inconsistent. Therefore, we recommend four factors that will help to better determine expertise. This review gives an overview of evaluation strategies for different types of graphs and across various domains, which could facilitate instructing students in evaluating graphs.

Many contributions have been made since Gestalt Psychology introduced the study of insight problem solving. Taking advantage of recent progression in neuroscientific techniques, scientists have supplemented traditional theories with data from newer paradigms. This has meant a leap forward in our knowledge of insight and it has also raised new questions about which cognitive processes are involved. Based on the most recent neurological model developed by Beeman, Bowden and Kounios (Beeman & Bowden, 2000; Bowden, Jung-Beeman, Fleck, & Kounios, 2005; Kounios, Frymiare, Bowden, Fleck, Subramaniam, Parrish, & Jung-Beeman, 2006; Kounios & Beeman, 2009), the work presented in this thesis investigated how problem solving involves attention and the visual system (Chapter 1). Previous studies demonstrated distinct patterns of neural activity for solving verbal problems via insight compared to analysis, both immediately prior the solutions and in rest periods before the presentation of each problem (Jung-Beeman et al., 2004; Kounios et al., 2006). We examined eye movement and blink patterns associated with the two different problem-solving styles, and in accordance with previous behavioral and neuroimaging research, the patterns have been found to be distinct. Specifically, more frequent and longer-lasting blinks were recorded during the two-second preparatory period before subjects saw problems that they subsequently solved with insight, compared to problems they went on to solve analytically. In the two-second period immediately prior to achieving insight solutions, participants also blinked longer and made more fixations outside the problem area compared to the same period preceding analytical solutions. A follow-up experiment further confirmed these findings, showing a modulation of the incoming bottom-up visual information during the preparatory period. These results reinforce and supplement previous studies which suggested that insight is related to the attention system, which modulates eye movements and blinking patterns, and also indexes a discrimination of internal vs. external directed visual attention between the two solving styles (Kounios & Beeman, 2009; Wegbreit, Suzuki, Grabowecky, Kounios, & Beeman, 2012). In Chapter 2, new data supplements Beeman, Bowden and Kounios’s model by detecting the influence of problem-solving styles on solution accuracy. The data obtained from four different types of problems demonstrated that solutions achieved via insight are more likely to be correct than answers achieved via analysis. Several potential explanations of the result are discussed, foremost the idea that insight depends on the integration of multiple weak associations; i.e., weak associations of problem related info to the solution, which summate boost the activation of the solution concept into consciousness. Thus, when the solution does emerge, it is necessarily correct. Taken together, these results indicated that insight problem solving is promoted by the gating of visual inputs. This diminishes external noise and directs attention inwardly, to facilitate answer accuracy. Furthermore, in order to allow the study of insight problem solving in Italy, the Italian language version of two of the most used tasks to study insight problem solving, has been tested and validated. In particular we benchmarked the Compound Remote Associates (CRA) word problems (Bowden & Jung-Beeman, 2003a) and the Rebus Problems (MacGregor & Cunningham, 2008).

Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Physics
N. Sanjay Rebello
The work described here represents an effort to understand and influence visual attention while solving physics problems containing a diagram. Our visual system is guided by two types of processes -- top-down and bottom-up. The top-down processes are internal and determined by ones prior knowledge and goals. The bottom-up processes are external and determined by features of the visual stimuli such as color, and luminance contrast. When solving physics problems both top-down and bottom-up processes are active, but to varying degrees. The existence of two types of processes opens several interesting questions for physics education. For example, how do bottom-up processes influence problem solvers in physics? Can we leverage these processes to draw attention to relevant diagram areas and improve problem-solving? In this dissertation we discuss three studies that investigate these open questions and rely on eye movements as a primary data source. We assume that eye movements reflect a person’s moment-to-moment cognitive processes, providing a window into one’s thinking. In our first study, we compared the way correct and incorrect solvers viewed relevant and novice-like elements in a physics problem diagram. We found correct solvers spent more time attending to relevant areas while incorrect solvers spent more time looking at novice-like areas. In our second study, we overlaid these problems with dynamic visual cues to help students’ redirect their attention. We found that in some cases these visual cues improved problem-solving performance and influenced visual attention. To determine more precisely how the perceptual salience of diagram elements influenced solvers’ attention, we conducted a third study where we manipulated the perceptual salience of the diagram elements via changes in luminance contrast. These changes did not influence participants’ answers or visual attention. Instead, similar to our first study, the time spent looking in various areas of the diagram was related to the correctness of an answer. These results suggest that top-down processes dominate while solving physics problems. In sum, the study of visual attention and visual cueing in particular shows that attention is an important component of physics problem-solving and can potentially be leveraged to improve student performance.

In four experiments on insight problem solving, we investigated the time course of the development of solution knowledge prior to response, as well as the impact of stimulus familiarity on task performance and eye movement measures. In each experiment, participants solved anagram problems while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiments 1a and 1b, each anagram problem consisted of a circular array of letters: a scrambled four-letter solution word containing three consonants and one vowel, and an additional randomly-placed distractor consonant. Viewing times on the distractor consonant compared to the solution consonants provided an online measure of knowledge of the solution. Viewing times on the distractor consonant and the solution consonants were indistinguishable early in the trial. In contrast, several seconds prior to the response, viewing times on the distractor consonant decreased in a gradual manner compared to viewing times on the solution consonants. Importantly, this pattern was obtained across both trials in which participants reported the subjective experience of insight and trials in which they did not. These findings are consistent with the availability of partial knowledge of the solution prior to such information being accessible to subjective phenomenal awareness. In Experiments 2 and 3, each anagram problem consisted of a centrally located three-letter string plus three additional individual letters located above and to the side of the central letter string. All the letters in the central letter string were members of the five-letter solution word, while one of the individual letters was a randomly placed distractor. In Experiment 2, we replicated our findings of the gradual development of solution knowledge using this more complex stimulus display. In Experiment 3, we manipulated the familiarity of the central letter string by presenting it either in the form of a three-letter word, or as a meaningless string of letters. Behavioural measures showed an overall negative impact of familiarity on task performance, while eye movement measures revealed a more complex pattern of effects, including both interference and facilitation. Critically, the effects of familiarity on problem solving did not interact with the development of solution knowledge prior to response.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

The aim of the research was the analysis of the problem dealing with solving of six Force concept inventory tasks by first-year university students using obtained eye-tracking data. Some characteristics like attention maps and sequences of fixations provide a deeper insight into the students’ approaches to the tasks verifying their conceptual understanding to Newtonian mechanics. It can be confirmed the correctly answering students found the correct solutions more straightforwardly making their decision between fewer options. This is also supported by the analysis of fixation numbers and fixation times. The results show differences in the way novices and experts process questions and enable to identify some persistent misconceptions. Keywords: eye-tracking, introductory physics course, scientific reasoning, solving tasks.