week 5 - visual attention Flashcards
visual scanning
looking from place to place
fixation
aiming fovea
saccadic eye movement
moving from one fixation point to another; usually jerky movement
overt attention
involves directly looking at attended object
covert attention
attention without looking
stimulus salience
areas of stimuli that attract attention due to their properties (color, contrast, movement, orientation, etc)
saliency maps
used to determine saliency; show fixations are related to such properties in initial scanning process
scene schema
prior knowledge about what is found in typical scenes; fixations influenced by knowledge
What are two results of scene schema?
- sometimes we don’t notice objects because they aren’t usually perceived in that area
- we initially focus on objects that seem out of place
task demands
as we engage in a particular task, our attention is fixated on key elements of the task on hand (step by step)
walking participant experiment
- subject walked around room and was encountered by pedestrians
- each pedestrian were prompted to move in certain directions and get in participant’s path at specific circuits
what did the walking participant study suggest?
potential for collision influences what we attend to
spatial attention
attention to specific locations
Posner experiment
- subjects looked at fixation point and told to state where they saw a box
- precueing arrow indicated which side stimulus would appear
- valid (consistent) vs. invalid (inconsistent) trials
what were the results of Posner experiment
- observers responded fast on valid trials
- information processing is most efficient when attention is directed
