The Role of Spatial Memory in Guiding Attention During Natural Vision. Carmi, R. & Itti, L. In Proc. Eye Tracking, Cognition and Communication Workshop of the Second Biennial Conference on Cognitive Science, St. Petersburg, Russia, Jun, 2006.
abstract   bibtex   
Paying attention to the right thing at the right time underlies the ability of humans and other animals to learn, perceive, and interact with their environment. A central unresolved question is the time frame in which spatial memory guides attention, with current estimates ranging from a single fixation to seconds, minutes, or even days. Here we answer this question by revealing the time course of attentional selection during natural vision. We asked human participants to visually explore either continuous or scene-shuffled video clips, and quantified the impact of memory-free influences on overt attentional selections (saccades) based on a computational saliency model. Overall, scene shuffling resulted in no significant differences in the impact of memory-free influences compared to continuous viewing. However, abrupt scene transitions (jump cuts) led to sharp peaks in the impact of memory-free influences, which then declined progressively across 7 fixations for up to 2.5 seconds. These results indicate that visual exploration of dynamic scenes critically depends on spatial memory traces that persist across several fixations for up to a couple of seconds.
@inproceedings{ Carmi_Itti06emcoc,
  author = {R. Carmi and L. Itti},
  title = {The Role of Spatial Memory in Guiding Attention During Natural Vision},
  abstract = {Paying attention to the right thing at the right time
underlies the ability of humans and other animals to learn, perceive,
and interact with their environment. A central unresolved question is
the time frame in which spatial memory guides attention, with current
estimates ranging from a single fixation to seconds, minutes, or even
days. Here we answer this question by revealing the time course of
attentional selection during natural vision. We asked human
participants to visually explore either continuous or scene-shuffled
video clips, and quantified the impact of memory-free influences on
overt attentional selections (saccades) based on a computational
saliency model. Overall, scene shuffling resulted in no significant
differences in the impact of memory-free influences compared to
continuous viewing. However, abrupt scene transitions (jump cuts) led
to sharp peaks in the impact of memory-free influences, which then
declined progressively across 7 fixations for up to 2.5 seconds. These
results indicate that visual exploration of dynamic scenes critically
depends on spatial memory traces that persist across several fixations
for up to a couple of seconds.},
  booktitle = {Proc. Eye Tracking, Cognition and Communication Workshop of the 
Second Biennial Conference on Cognitive Science},
  address = {St. Petersburg, Russia},
  month = {Jun},
  year = {2006},
  type = {bu;td;mod;eye},
  review = {abs/wkshp},
  file = {http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/doc/Carmi_Itti06emcoc.pdf}
}

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