Mapping Visual Attention with Change Blindness in 3D

想想一个人在一天中可能遇到的各种视觉场景，以及视觉注意力从一个场景分配到下一个场景的不同方式。从寻找钥匙到购买杂货，再到参加聚会，人们的注意力必须分散在视觉环境中的物体上。视觉注意的分布是感知和行为功能的关键组成部分，这些功能的进化赋予了人类行为显著的灵活性和适应性。多年来，认知科学家一直在研究注意力的分配，但这些研究中的大多数都使用了相对有限的注意力测量方法，主要是在简单的二维视觉刺激的背景下。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，谢博士将开发一种新的方法，在所有三个空间维度上测量注意力的分布。这种新方法利用了一个公认的发现，即当视觉场景发生全局变化时（比如房间里的灯忽明忽暗），一个人只能检测到正在关注的局部变化（比如说话者嘴唇的移动）。谢博士开发了一种使用局部变化检测的方法，作为在复杂、现实的视觉对象和场景中分配注意力的一种手段。这种“注意图”将为测试视觉注意的功能和神经基础理论提供丰富的数据来源。

Consider the variety of visual scenes that one might encounter over the course of a typical day, and the different ways that visual attention can be allocated from one scene to the next. From searching for keys to shopping for groceries to mingling at a party, attention must be spread over and across the objects in a person's visual environment. The distribution of visual attention is a key component of the perceptual and behavioral functions that have evolved to endow human behavior with its remarkable flexibility and adaptivity. Cognitive scientists have been studying the allocation of attention for many years, but the large majority of these studies have used relatively limited measures of attention, mostly in the context of simple, two-dimensional visual stimuli.With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Tse will develop a new method of measuring the distribution of attention, in all three dimensions of space. This new method takes advantage of the well-established finding that, while global changes are occurring in visual scence (like the lights in a room flickering on and off), a person can detect only local changes that are being attended to (like the movement of a talker's lips). Dr. Tse has developed a way to use local change detection as a means of mapping out the allocation of attention across complex, realistic visual objects and scenes. Such "attentional maps" will provide a rich source of data for testing theories of the functional and neural bases of visual attention.