Mapping Visual Attention with Change Blindness in 3D

考虑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。从寻找钥匙到买杂货，再到在派对上打成一片，人们的注意力必须分散在人的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，这些功能已经进化为赋予人类行为显着的灵活性和适应性。多年来，认知科学家一直在研究注意力的分配，但这些研究中的绝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。在国家科学基金会的支持下，谢博士将开发一种新的方法来测量注意力在所有三个空间维度的分配。这种新方法利用了一项公认的发现，即虽然视觉场景正在发生全局变化(就像房间里的灯闪烁和关闭一样)，但人只能检测到正在被注意的局部变化(比如说话者的嘴唇的移动)。谢霆锋开发了一种方法，将局部变化检测作为一种方法，来绘制复杂、逼真的视觉对象和场景之间的注意力分配。这种“注意力图谱”将为检验视觉注意力的功能和神经基础的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.