Author: Cristino Filipe Baddeley Roland
Publisher: Routledge Ltd
ISSN: 1464-0716
Source: Visual Cognition, Vol.17, Iss.6-7, 2009-08, pp. : 880-903
Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.
Abstract
In this paper we set out to answer two questions. The first aims to discover whether saccades are driven by low level image features (as suggested by a number of recent and influential models), a position we call image salience, or whether they are driven by the meaning and reward associated with the world, a position we call world salience. The second question concerns the reference frame in which the eye movements are planned. To answer these questions, we recorded six videos, using a head mounted camera, with the viewer walking down a popular shopping street in Bristol. As well as showing these videos to our participants, we also showed spatially and temporally filtered versions of them. We found that, at a coarse spatial scale, subjects viewed similar locations in the image, irrespective of the filtering, and that fixation distributions found when viewing videos with similar filtering were no more alike than if the filtering varied widely. Using a novel mixture modelling technique, we also showed that the most important reference frame was world-centred rather than head or body-based. This was confirmed by a second experiment where the fixation distributions to identical videos was systematically changed by using a swivelling tent that only altered subjects' perception of the gravitational vertical. We conclude that eye movements should not be understood in terms of image salience, or even information maximization, but in terms of the more flexible concept of reward maximization.
Related content
Eye movements in search in visual neglect
By Forti Sara Humphreys Glyn Watson Derrick
Visual Cognition, Vol. 12, Iss. 6, 2005-08 ,pp. :
Icons, visual buffers, and eye movements
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 6, Iss. 1, 1983-03 ,pp. :
Top-down control of eye movements: Yarbus revisited
By DeAngelus Marianne Pelz Jeff
Visual Cognition, Vol. 17, Iss. 6-7, 2009-08 ,pp. :
Eye movements during visual mental imagery
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 6, Iss. 7, 2002-07 ,pp. :
Aging and Shifts of Visual Attention in Saccadic Eye Movements
By Kaneko Rika
Experimental Aging Research, Vol. 30, Iss. 2, 2004-01 ,pp. :