Eye movement guidance in familiar visual scenes : a role for scene specific location priors in search

Abstract

Ecologically relevant search typically requires making rapid and strategic eye movements in complex, cluttered environments. Attention allocation is known to be influenced by low level image features, visual scene context, and top down task constraints. Scene specific context develops when observers repeatedly search the same environment (e.g. one's workplace or home) and this often leads to faster search performance. How does prior experience influence the deployment of eye movements when searching a familiar scene? One challenge lies in distinguishing between the roles of scene specific experience and general scene knowledge. Chapter 1 investigates eye guidance in novel scenes by comparing how well several models of search guidance predict fixation locations, and establishes a benchmark for inter-observer fixation agreement. Chapters 2 and 3 explore spatial and temporal characteristics of eye guidance from scene specific location priors. Chapter 2 describes comparative map analysis, a novel technique for analyzing spatial patterns in eye movement data, and reveals that past history influences fixation selection in three search experiments. In Chapter 3, two experiments use a response-deadline approach to investigate the time course of memory-based search guidance. Altogether, these results describe how using long-term memory of scene specific representations can effectively guide the eyes to informative regions when searching a familiar scene.