The guidance of human visual selection by complex stimuli

现在提到在医学图像中寻找肿瘤，或者使用复杂的仪器面板在复杂的领域中导航车辆，作为任何关于视觉注意的研究的应用，似乎是司空见惯的。然而，正是这些任务的共同性质，以及如果理解和考虑人类视觉选择的特性可以避免的潜在危险，使得对这些问题的讨论变得如此无处不在。鉴于视觉可获得的信息量巨大，并考虑到感知和认知资源的局限性，生物体的生存依赖于快速选择这些信息的子集进行深入处理。早期选择机制几乎影响所有视觉处理，这里提出的研究将增加我们对相关机制行为和相互作用方式的理解。研究人员使用各种实验任务来研究这种选择是如何发生的。搜索任务在日常生活中很常见，我的目标之一是确定在受控的实验室环境中，哪些类型的信息可以促进表现。通常，无论是在真实环境中还是在受控的实验室环境中，要检测或识别的信息可能会短暂地呈现出来，然后以某种方式被另一种刺激遮盖住。这里提出的研究取得的进展可以应用于改进任何需要人类用户注意或找到东西的设备的设计。在某些情况下，设计糟糕的工具将产生比仅仅是低效更严重的影响，例如对司机和飞行员的展示。因此，除了澄清基本问题外，这项工作还将为开发有效的软件工具和其他用户界面设备提供进一步重要的设计原则。

It now seems commonplace to mention looking for tumours in medical images, or navigating vehicles through complex territory using complicated instrument panels, as applications for any research on visual attention.  However, it is the common nature of these tasks, and the potential dangers that could be avoided if the properties of human visual selection are understood and taken into account, that have made discussions of these issues so ubiquitous. Given the overwhelming amount of information available to vision, and given the limitations of perceptual and cognitive resources, an organism's survival depends on fast selection of subsets of that information for in-depth processing.  Early selection mechanisms affect virtually all visual processing, and the research proposed here will increase our understanding of the way the relevant mechanisms behave and interact. Researchers use a variety of experimental tasks to investigate how this selection occurs. Search tasks are common in everyday life and one of my goals is to determine what kinds of information can facilitate performance, within a controlled lab environment.  Often, both in the real environment and in a controlled lab setting, the information to be detected or identified may be presented briefly and then obscured in some way ("masked") by another stimulus. Advances made by the research proposed here may be applied to improving the design of any piece of equipment which requires a human user to notice or find something. In some instances badly designed tools will have effects more drastic than mere inefficiency, for example displays for drivers and pilots. Thus, in addition to clarifying basic issues, this work will provide further important design principles for the development of effective software tools and other user interface devices.