Combining top-down processes to guide eye movements during real-world scene search

Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processing during MW. The current study used Recurrence Quantification Analysis (Anderson, Bischof, Laidlaw, Risko, & Kingstone, 2013) to describe the pattern of refixations (fixations directed to previously-inspected regions) during MW. Participants completed a real-world scene encoding task and responded to thought probes assessing intentional and unintentional MW. Both types of MW were associated with worse memory of the scenes. Importantly, RQA showed that scanpaths during unintentional MW were more repetitive than during on-task episodes, as indicated by a higher recurrence rate and more stereotypical fixation sequences. This increased repetitiveness suggests an adaptive response to processing failures through re-examining previous locations. Moreover, this increased repetitiveness contributed to fixations focusing on a smaller spatial scale of the stimuli. Finally, we were also able to validate several traditional measures: both intentional and unintentional MW were associated with fewer and longer fixations; Eye-blinking increased numerically during both types of MW but the difference was only significant for unintentional MW. Overall, the results advanced our understanding of how visual processing is affected during MW by highlighting the sequential aspect of eye movements.

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MODELING AUDITORY PATHWAY FOR INTELLIGENT INFORMATION ACQUISITION

International Journal of Information Acquisition ◽

10.1142/s0219878904000367 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 01 (04) ◽

pp. 345-356

Author(s):

HYUNG-MIN PARK ◽

JONG-HWAN LEE ◽

TAESU KIM ◽

UN-MIN BAE ◽

BYUNG TAEK KIM ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Feature Extraction ◽

Real World ◽

Information Acquisition ◽

Recognition Performance ◽

Auditory Pathway ◽

Blind Signal Separation ◽

Top Down ◽

Auditory Model ◽

Time Frequency ◽

Binaural Processing

An auditory model has been developed for an intelligent speech information acquisition system in real-world noisy environment. The developed mathematical model of the human auditory pathway consists of three components, i.e. the nonlinear feature extraction from cochlea to auditory cortex, the binaural processing at superior olivery complex, and the top-down attention from higher brain to the cochlea. The feature extraction is based on information-theoretic sparse coding throughout the auditory pathway. Also, the time-frequency masking is incorporated as a model of the lateral inhibition in both time and frequency domain. The binaural processing is modeled as the blind signal separation and adaptive noise canceling based on the independent component analysis with hundreds of time-delays for noisy reverberated signals. The Top-Down (TD) attention comes from familiarity and/or importance of the sensory information, i.e. the sound, and a simple but efficient TD attention model had been developed based on the error backpropagation algorithm. Also, the binaural processing and top-down attention are combined for speech signals with heavy noises. This auditory model requires extensive computing, and special hardware had been developed for real-time applications. Experimental results demonstrate much better recognition performance in real-world noisy environments.

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Modeling the Influences of Cyclic Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processes for Reinforcement Learning in Eye Movements

IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics - Part A Systems and Humans ◽

10.1109/tsmca.2009.2018635 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 39 (4) ◽

pp. 706-714 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Ji Hyoun Lim ◽

Yili Liu

Keyword(s):

Reinforcement Learning ◽

Eye Movements ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up

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Eye Movements in Real-World Scene Photographs: General Characteristics and Effects of Viewing Task

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02915 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Deborah A. Cronin ◽

Elizabeth H. Hall ◽

Jessica E. Goold ◽

Taylor R. Hayes ◽

John M. Henderson

Keyword(s):

Eye Movements ◽

Real World

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Top-Down versus Bottom-up Control of Saccades in Texture Perception

Perception ◽

10.1068/v970141 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 26 (1_suppl) ◽

pp. 162-162 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

R Groner ◽

A von Mühlenen ◽

M Groner

Keyword(s):

Eye Movements ◽

Spatial Frequency ◽

Target Stimulus ◽

Saccadic Eye Movements ◽

Landing Site ◽

Luminance Contrast ◽

Eye Tracker ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Low Pass

An experiment was conducted to examine the influence of luminance, contrast, and spatial frequency content on saccadic eye movements. 112 pictures of natural textures from Brodatz were low-pass filtered (0.04 – 0.76 cycles deg−1) and high-pass filtered (1.91 – 19.56 cycles deg−1) and varied in luminance (low and high) and contrast (low and high), resulting in eight images per texture. Circular clippings of the central parts of the images (approximately 15% of the whole image) were used as stimuli. In the condition of bottom - up processing, the eight stimuli derived from one texture were presented for 1500 ms in a circular arrangement around the fixation cross. They were followed by a briefly presented target stimulus in the centre, which in half the trials was identical to one of the eight test stimuli. Participants had to decide whether the target stimulus was identical to any of the preceding stimuli. During a trial, their eye movements were recorded by means of a Dual-Purkinje-Image eye tracker. In the top - down condition, the target stimulus was presented in each trial prior to the display of the test stimulus. It was assumed that the priming with a target produced a top - down processing of the test stimuli. The latency and landing site of the first saccade were computed and compared between the top - down and bottom - up conditions. It is hypothesised that stimulus characteristics (luminance, contrast, and spatial frequency) play a more prominent role in bottom - up processing, while top - down processing is adjusted to the particular characteristics of the prime.

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