Lecture 5- Attention and Eye Tracking Flashcards
How can whether a cue is valid or not affect reaction speed?
When endogenous and exogenous cues validly cue a stimulus, our reaction time to which we look at the location of the stimulus is shorter.
What is Stimulus Onset Asynchrony?
The amount of time there is between a cue and a stimulus.
What is the Simon effect?
We find activities that are congruent with our perception to be easier (i.e. moving our left hand when we hear something in our left ear). Therefore, a consistent representation (i.e. moving left after being told to in our left ear) are easier to compute, we are faster to respond to them and inconsistent representations can cause our attention to be less focused/strong.
What are automatic processes?
Process instigated without conscious effort or control that don’t require cognitive resources
What are controlled processes?
A process that is voluntarily undertaken to meet a goal, requiring cognitive processes
With enough practice, controlled processes can become automatic processes
What is the cornea?
Cornea- the front part, the “window”, from the latin for “horny tissue”
What is the pupil?
Pupil- the hole in the cornea, is narrowed and widened with radial and circular muscles, which control how the light lands on the retina
What is the fovea?
Fovea- an area with high receptor density, helps us have high visual acuity
it has a large amount of cones and low amount of rods, resulting in high visual acuity. This also explains why our central vision tends to have high spatial resolution and our peripheral vision tends to have low spatial resolution.
Can we attend to information we are not directly looking at?
refer to overt and covert attention
We can attend to information that we are not directly looking at but we generally don’t. When we are attending to something but are not actually looking at it, we call this covert attention. When we attend to something we are looking at, we call this covert attention.
How big/detailed is the visual area covered by the fovea?
The visual area covered by the fovea is the size of the thumbnail at arms length. To quantify this, this is like 7000 pixels. Outside of the fovea, visual resolution drops to just a few dozen pixels.
What are the two types of eye movements?
Fixations- Where our eyes are stopped and focused
Saccades- a rapid, jerky eye movement. We don’t actually take in any information whilst this movement is occurring, hence why it is so handy that they are so rapid.
What are desktop eye trackers?
It requires a chin rest in order to make sure your head stays still and that you are a standard distance from a screen. Records eye movements around 30 times every second.
What are mobile eye trackers?
how it works, the cameras and accuracy
An eye tracker built into a VR device. This tracks corneal reflections- it shines infrared light into someone’s eyes and then tracks how this moves as their eye moves. There is a camera on the front picking up the field of vision and two cameras beneath each eye picking up the eyes themselves. Can pick up 3-5 fixations per second, blink rate and pupil dilation
How do eyes tend to perceive faces?
How does this vary with culture?
Eyes tend to fixate on the centre of the face when we perceive it. However, this may be affected by culture. Western cultures tend to focus eyes automatically more on the eyes and mouth. East Asian cultures tend to focus more on the central area of the face.
How can heat maps be used to track eye movements?
Heat maps can be used to track eye movement- warmer colours show areas where features were fixated on for longer
