scholarly journals Salient in space, salient in time: Fixation probability predicts fixation duration during natural scene viewing

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Einhäuser ◽  
Antje Nuthmann
Author(s):  
R. Calen Walshe ◽  
Antje Nuthmann

AbstractResearch on eye-movement control during natural scene viewing has investigated the degree to which the duration of individual fixations can be immediately adjusted to ongoing visual-cognitive processing demands. Results from several studies using the fixation-contingent scene quality paradigm suggest that the timing of fixations adapts to stimulus changes that occur on a fixation-to-fixation basis. Analysis of fixation-duration distributions has revealed that saccade-contingent degradations and enhancements of the scene stimulus have two qualitatively distinct types of influence. The surprise effect begins early in a fixation and is tied to surprising visual events such as unexpected stimulus changes. The encoding effect is tied to difficulties in visual-cognitive processing and occurs relatively late within a fixation. Here, we formalize an existing descriptive account of these two effects (referred to as the dual-process account) by using stochastic simulations. In the computational model, surprise and encoding related influences are implemented as time-dependent changes in the rate at which saccade timing and programming are completed during critical fixations. The model was tested on data from two experiments in which the luminance of the scene image was either decreased or increased during selected critical fixations (Walshe & Nuthmann, Vision Research, 100, 38–46 2014). A counterfactual method was used to remove model components and to identify their specific influence on the fixation_duration distributions. The results suggest that the computational dual-process model provides a good account for the data from the luminance-change studies. We describe how the simulations can be generalized to explain a diverse set of experimental results.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (10) ◽  
pp. 2771-2776 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hildward Vandormael ◽  
Santiago Herce Castañón ◽  
Jan Balaguer ◽  
Vickie Li ◽  
Christopher Summerfield

Humans move their eyes to gather information about the visual world. However, saccadic sampling has largely been explored in paradigms that involve searching for a lone target in a cluttered array or natural scene. Here, we investigated the policy that humans use to overtly sample information in a perceptual decision task that required information from across multiple spatial locations to be combined. Participants viewed a spatial array of numbers and judged whether the average was greater or smaller than a reference value. Participants preferentially sampled items that were less diagnostic of the correct answer (“inlying” elements; that is, elements closer to the reference value). This preference to sample inlying items was linked to decisions, enhancing the tendency to give more weight to inlying elements in the final choice (“robust averaging”). These findings contrast with a large body of evidence indicating that gaze is directed preferentially to deviant information during natural scene viewing and visual search, and suggest that humans may sample information “robustly” with their eyes during perceptual decision-making.


2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsueh-Cheng Wang ◽  
Alex D. Hwang ◽  
Marc Pomplun

During text reading, the durations of eye fixations decrease with greater frequency and predictability of the currently fixated word (Rayner, 1998; 2009). However, it has not been tested whether those results also apply to scene viewing. We computed object frequency and predictability from both linguistic and visual scene analysis (LabelMe, Russell et al., 2008), and Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer et al., 1998) was applied to estimate predictability. In a scene-viewing experiment, we found that, for small objects, linguistics-based frequency, but not scene-based frequency, had effects on first fixation duration, gaze duration, and total time. Both linguistic and scene-based predictability affected total time. Similar to reading, fixation duration decreased with higher frequency and predictability. For large objects, we found the direction of effects to be the inverse of those found in reading studies. These results suggest that the recognition of small objects in scene viewing shares some characteristics with the recognition of words in reading.


2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Brockmole ◽  
Michael L. Mack ◽  
Monica S. Castelhano ◽  
Aude Oliva ◽  
John M. Henderson

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (7) ◽  
pp. 1025-1041
Author(s):  
Katherine I. Pomaranski ◽  
Taylor R. Hayes ◽  
Mee-Kyoung Kwon ◽  
John M. Henderson ◽  
Lisa M. Oakes

i-Perception ◽  
10.1068/if719 ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 719-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryoichi Nakashima ◽  
Yu Fang ◽  
Kazumichi Matsumiya ◽  
Rumi Tokunaga ◽  
Ichiro Kuriki ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Einhäuser ◽  
Charlotte Atzert ◽  
Antje Nuthmann

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