~Chapter 6 - Lecture Section 6.1 Flashcards
What is Attention?
Attention is the allocation of mental resources
What is the function of Visual Attention?
Visual Attention serves as a mediating mechanism, enabling us to selectively grant priority of processing to certain aspects of the visual scene.
Things we are not paying attention to are less processed.
What can spotlight be used as an analogy for?
Visual Attention
What is Selective Attention?
Focusing on specific objects and ignoring others
Who said this about Selective Attention: “My experience is what I agree to attend to”
William James (1890)
Why is Attention necessary in general?
Attention is probably a general mechanism which is related to limited mental resources in an environment where there is sensory bombardment, an overload of information and you cannot process all of it, so there has to be this filter, and attention provides this filter
Why is Attention necessary for vision?
It may be related to the structure of the eye (fovea vs. periphery). There is a very high acuity visual information signal available at the Fovea, but at the Periphery, there is much more Convergence, and so there is lower acuity
Why is there is a close relationship that exists in natural viewing between what you’re looking at, and what you are attending?
For vision, perhaps due to the high acuity view of the Fovea
There is a close relationship that exists in natural viewing between what you’re ___, and what you are ___.
looking at // attending
Scanning the fovea over objects of interest allows the visual system a ___ view
High Acuity
What are Saccades?
Rapid eye movements. Rapidly moving your eyes when looking between objects in a scene. Saccade also means “jump”
What is Fixation?
The pauses between Saccades
How long are Fixation pasues?
These pauses are around ~300ms on average
How many Saccades do we make per second?
We make about 3 Saccades per second
Studying ___ between different objects gives us insight into what the person is paying attention to
Saccades
There are many ___ features of a scene, so characteristics that can determine where we will look
Bottom-up
What are Scene Characteristics?
High saliency features grab our attention (e.g. high contrast, bright colors)
What is Saliency?
Saliency means the noticeability of a stimulus, so things that are high contrast or bright colours, attention-grabbing things.
What is an example of Saliency?
A man in a red shirt is sitting in a crowd of people wearing white shirts, he is attention-grabbing and Salient.
What is Attentional Capture?
Occurs when a high Salience feature causes an involuntary shift of attention (sudden movements, loud sounds).
What is a Saliency Map?
A “map” of a visual display that takes into account characteristics of the display such as colour, contrast, and orientation that are associated with capturing attention. (6)
How is a Saliency Map made?
Orientation + Colour + Contrast
What features on a Saliency Map appear as lighter pixels?
Extended contours, high contrast, or differences in colour, show up as these high Salience features.
Saliency often drives the first few fixations, but later scene scanning is influenced by ___.
cognitive factors
We use ___ and ___ to apply knowledge of what is normally contained in a typical scene.
Scene Schemas // Semantic Regularities
Where you will look depends on ___.
What you expect to find
Attention can also be directed by ___ and ___.
interest // goals
Different parts of a scene or objects are important for different ___.
goals
A single scene filled with multi-dimensional stimuli can evoke different patterns of eye movement, Saccades and Fixations, depending on the ___.
Goal
There are very distinct patterns of Saccades and Fixations depending on what the person is trying to ___ when looking at the picture.
accomplish
The pattern of Saccades and Fixations will also depend on the ___.
task demands
Task demands involve more ___ viewing.
Naturalistic
What are task demands?
This is more naturalistic viewing where gaze is directed to various objects with specific timing or order as the task unfolds, so everyday tasks will produce a stereotypical order of bodily movements and they will be preceded by a very stereotypical order of eye movements.
In a task demand, where you’re going to look depends on ___.
What you need to do
Eye movements usually ___ a bodily motor action by a fraction of a second.
precede
Can you pay attention to things without fixating on them (i.e. without eye movements)?
Yes
What is Overt Attention?
Overt Attention is where you are looking at the thing you are paying attention to
What is Covert Attention?
You are paying attention to something you are not looking at.
When a basketball player is executing a “no-look” pass, what are they doing?
The player is using Covert Attention to give the other players an impression that they’re heading one way, then passing the ball the other way
