Adaptive Gaze Control in Natural Environments

By Jelena Jovancevic-Misic, Mary M. Hayhoe. 2009

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The sequential acquisition of visual information from scenes is a fundamental component of natural visually guided behavior. However, little is known about the control mechanisms responsible for the eye movement sequences that are executed in the service of such behavior. Theoretical attempts to explain gaze patterns have almost exclusively concerned two-dimensional displays that do not accurately reflect the demands of natural behavior in dynamic environments or the importance of the observer's behavioral goals. A difficult problem for all models of gaze control, intrinsic to selective perceptual systems, is how to detect important but unexpected stimuli without consuming excessive computational resources. We show, in a real walking environment, that human gaze patterns are remarkably sensitive to the probabilistic structure of the environment, suggesting that observers handle the uncertainty of the natural world by proactively allocating gaze on the basis of learned statistical structure. This is consistent with the role of reward in the oculomotor neural circuitry and supports a reinforcement learning approach to understanding gaze control in natural environments.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Information seeking, curiosity and attention: computational and neural mechanisms (2013, neutral): “gaze is proactively guided by estimates of uncertainty comes from a virtual reality study where groups of observers walked along a track (Jovancevic-Misic and Hayhoe 2009).”
Examining the Relationship between Construction Workers’ Visual Attention and Situation Awareness under Fall and Tripping Hazard Conditions: Using Mobile Eye Tracking (2018, background): “These benefits have fueled an incredible growth in studies of visual attention and eye movement in natural settings (e.g., walking and driving) (Shinoda et al. 2001; Jovanevic-Misic and Hayhoe 2009), and have opened the door for a wide variety of applications in construction safety.”
Attention and choice: a review on eye movements in decision making. (2013, background): “The high degree of similarity between thefindings of Jovancevic-Misic and Hayhoe (2009), and the findings on expertise effects, implies a common pattern with regard to how learning affects attention.”
Eye guidance in natural vision: Reinterpreting salience (2011, unknown): “statistics was demonstrated by Jovancevic-Misic and Hayhoe (2009). In a real walking setting, they were able Journal of Vision (2011) 11(5):5, 1–23 Tatler, Hayhoe, Land, & Ballard 14”