Spatial statistics and attentional dynamics in scene viewing

Spatial statistics and attentional dynamics in scene viewing.

In humans and in foveated animals visual acuity is highly concentrated at the center of gaze, so that choosing where to look next is an important example of online, rapid decision-making. Computational neuroscientists have developed biologically-inspired models of visual attention, termed saliency maps, which successfully predict where people fixate on average. Using point process theory for sp...

Rigorous spatial statistics for gaze patterns in scene viewing: Effects of repeated viewing

Draft manuscript—please do not cite without permission 2 Scene viewing is used to study attentional selection in complex but still controlled environments. One of the main observations on eye movements during scene viewing is the inhomogeneous distribution of fixation locations: While some parts of an image are fixated by almost all observers and are inspected repeatedly by the same observer, o...

Armed and attentive: holding a weapon can bias attentional priorities in scene viewing.

The action-specific perception hypothesis (Witt, Current Directions in Psychological Science 20: 201-206, 2011) claims that the environment is represented with respect to potential interactions for objects present within said environment. This investigation sought to extend the hypothesis beyond perceptual mechanisms and assess whether action-specific potential could alter attentional allocatio...

Overt attentional prioritization of new objects and feature changes during real-world scene viewing

The authors investigated the extent to which a change to an object’s colour is overtly prioritized for fixation relative to the appearance of a new object during real-world scene viewing. Both types of scene change captured gaze (and attention) when introduced during a fixation, although colour changes captured attention less often than new objects. Neither of these scene changes captured atten...

Attentional Orienting and Scene Semantics