Elsevier

Vision Research

Volume 41, Issues 25–26, November–December 2001, Pages 3535-3545
Vision Research

What controls attention in natural environments?

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Abstract

The highly task-specific fixation patterns revealed in performance of natural tasks demonstrate the fundamentally active nature of vision, and suggest that in many situations, top-down processes may be a major factor in the acquisition of visual information. Understanding how a top-down visual system could function requires understanding the mechanisms that control the initiation of the different task-specific computations at the appropriate time. This is particularly difficult in dynamic environments, like driving, where many aspects of the visual input may be unpredictable. We therefore examined drivers' abilities to detect Stop signs in a virtual environment when the signs were visible for restricted periods of time. Detection performance is heavily modulated both by the instructions and the local visual context. This suggests that visibility of the signs requires active search, and that the frequency of this search is influenced by learnt knowledge of the probabilistic structure of the environment.

Keywords

Attention
Saccades

Cited by (0)

1

Present address: Department of Photonics, Ritsumeikan University, Kusatsu Shiga 525-8577, Japan.