Dataset Information

Cultural and Developmental Influences on Overt Visual Attention to Videos.

ABSTRACT: Top-down influences on observers' overt attention and how they interact with the features of the visual environment have been extensively investigated, but the cultural and developmental aspects of these modulations have been understudied. In this study we investigated these effects for US and Yucatec Mayan infants, children, and adults. Mayan and US participants viewed videos of two actors performing daily Mayan and US tasks in the foreground and the background while their eyes were tracked. Our region of interest analysis showed that viewers from the US looked significantly less at the foreground activity and spent more time attending to the 'contextual' information (static background) compared to Mayans. To investigate how and what visual features of videos were attended to in a comprehensive manner, we used multivariate methods which showed that visual features are attended to differentially by each culture. Additionally, we found that Mayan and US infants utilize the same eye-movement patterns in which fixation duration and saccade amplitude are altered in response to the visual stimuli independently. However, a bifurcation happens by age 6, at which US participants diverge and engage in eye-movement patterns where fixation durations and saccade amplitudes are altered simultaneously.

SUBMITTER: Kardan O

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5595807 | biostudies-other | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Cultural and Developmental Influences on Overt Visual Attention to Videos.

Kardan Omid O Shneidman Laura L Krogh-Jespersen Sheila S Gaskins Suzanne S Berman Marc G MG Woodward Amanda A

Scientific reports 20170912 1

Top-down influences on observers' overt attention and how they interact with the features of the visual environment have been extensively investigated, but the cultural and developmental aspects of these modulations have been understudied. In this study we investigated these effects for US and Yucatec Mayan infants, children, and adults. Mayan and US participants viewed videos of two actors performing daily Mayan and US tasks in the foreground and the background while their eyes were tracked. Ou ...[more]

PMID: 28900172

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Project description:BACKGROUND: In a visual oddball paradigm, attention to an event usually modulates the event-related potential (ERP). An ERP-based brain-computer interface (BCI) exploits this neural mechanism for communication. Hitherto, it was unclear to what extent the accuracy of such a BCI requires eye movements (overt attention) or whether it is also feasible for targets in the visual periphery (covert attention). Also unclear was how the visual design of the BCI can be improved to meet peculiarities of peripheral vision such as low spatial acuity and crowding. METHOD: Healthy participants (N = 13) performed a copy-spelling task wherein they had to count target intensifications. EEG and eye movements were recorded concurrently. First, (c)overt attention was investigated by way of a target fixation condition and a central fixation condition. In the latter, participants had to fixate a dot in the center of the screen and allocate their attention to a target in the visual periphery. Second, the effect of visual speller layout was investigated by comparing the symbol Matrix to an ERP-based Hex-o-Spell, a two-levels speller consisting of six discs arranged on an invisible hexagon. RESULTS: We assessed counting errors, ERP amplitudes, and offline classification performance. There is an advantage (i.e., less errors, larger ERP amplitude modulation, better classification) of overt attention over covert attention, and there is also an advantage of the Hex-o-Spell over the Matrix. Using overt attention, P1, N1, P2, N2, and P3 components are enhanced by attention. Using covert attention, only N2 and P3 are enhanced for both spellers, and N1 and P2 are modulated when using the Hex-o-Spell but not when using the Matrix. Consequently, classifiers rely mainly on early evoked potentials in overt attention and on later cognitive components in covert attention. CONCLUSIONS: Both overt and covert attention can be used to drive an ERP-based BCI, but performance is markedly lower for covert attention. The Hex-o-Spell outperforms the Matrix, especially when eye movements are not permitted, illustrating that performance can be increased if one accounts for peculiarities of peripheral vision.

Project description:Visual attention is thought to be driven by the interplay between low-level visual features and task dependent information content of local image regions, as well as by spatial viewing biases. Though dependent on experimental paradigms and model assumptions, this idea has given rise to varying claims that either bottom-up or top-down mechanisms dominate visual attention. To contribute toward a resolution of this discussion, here we quantify the influence of these factors and their relative importance in a set of classification tasks. Our stimuli consist of individual image patches (bubbles). For each bubble we derive three measures: a measure of salience based on low-level stimulus features, a measure of salience based on the task dependent information content derived from our subjects' classification responses and a measure of salience based on spatial viewing biases. Furthermore, we measure the empirical salience of each bubble based on our subjects' measured eye gazes thus characterizing the overt visual attention each bubble receives. A multivariate linear model relates the three salience measures to overt visual attention. It reveals that all three salience measures contribute significantly. The effect of spatial viewing biases is highest and rather constant in different tasks. The contribution of task dependent information is a close runner-up. Specifically, in a standardized task of judging facial expressions it scores highly. The contribution of low-level features is, on average, somewhat lower. However, in a prototypical search task, without an available template, it makes a strong contribution on par with the two other measures. Finally, the contributions of the three factors are only slightly redundant, and the semi-partial correlation coefficients are only slightly lower than the coefficients for full correlations. These data provide evidence that all three measures make significant and independent contributions and that none can be neglected in a model of human overt visual attention.

Dataset Information

Cultural and Developmental Influences on Overt Visual Attention to Videos.

Publications

Cultural and Developmental Influences on Overt Visual Attention to Videos.

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