Are fixations in static natural scenes a useful predictor of attention in the real world?

Research investigating scene perception normally involves laboratory experiments using static images. Much has been learned about how observers look at pictures of the real world and the attentional mechanisms underlying this behaviour. However, the use of static, isolated pictures as a proxy for studying everyday attention in real environments has led to the criticism that such experiments are artificial. We report a new study that tests the extent to which the real world can be reduced to simpler laboratory stimuli. We recorded the gaze of participants walking on a university campus with a mobile eye tracker, and then showed static frames from this walk to new participants, in either a random or sequential order. The aim was to compare the gaze of participants walking in the real environment with fixations on pictures of the same scene. The data show that picture order affects interobserver fixation consistency and changes looking patterns. Critically, while fixations on the static images overlapped significantly with the actual real-world eye movements, they did so no more than a model that assumed a general bias to the centre. Remarkably, a model that simply takes into account where the eyes are normally positioned in the head-independent of what is actually in the scene-does far better than any other model. These data reveal that viewing patterns to static scenes are a relatively poor proxy for predicting real world eye movement behaviour, while raising intriguing possibilities for how to best measure attention in everyday life

A Preliminary Investigation Regarding the Effect of Tennis Grunting: Does White Noise During a Tennis Shot Have a Negative Impact on Shot Perception?

Background: There is a growing chorus of critics who complain that many of the top-ranked professional tennis players who grunt when they hit the ball gain an unfair advantage because the sound of the grunt interferes with their opponent’s game. However, there is no scientific evidence to support this claim. Methodology/Principal Findings: We explored this potential detrimental effect of grunting by presenting videos of a tennis player hitting a ball to either side of a tennis court; the shot either did, or did not, contain a brief sound that occurred at the same time as contact. The participants ’ task was to respond as quickly as possible, indicating whether the ball was being hit to the left- or right-side of the court. The results were unequivocal: The presence of an extraneous sound interfered with a participants ’ performance, making their responses both slower and less accurate. Conclusions/Significance: Our data suggest that a grunting player has a competitive edge on the professional tennis tour. The mechanism that underlies this effect is a topic for future investigation. Viable alternatives are discussed. For example, the possibility that the interfering auditory stimulus masks the sound of the ball being struck by the racket or it distracts a

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause

Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study explores that issue by examining the time course of eye movements and manual localization responses to targets in the presence of sudden-onset distractors. The results demonstrate that for both response types, the proportion of trials on which responses are erroneously directed to sudden onsets reflects the quality of information about the visual display at a given point in time. Oculomotor capture appears to be a specific instance of a more general attentional capture effect. Differences and similarities between the two types of capture can be explained by the critical idea that the quality of information about a visual display changes over time and that different response systems tend to access this information at different moments in time

Age and beauty are in the eye of the beholder

How “old” and “attractive” an individual appears has increasingly become an individual concern leading to the utilisation of various cosmetic surgical procedures aimed at enhancing appearance. Using eyetracking, in the present study we aimed to investigate how individuals perceive age and attractiveness of younger and older faces and what “bottom-up” facial cues are used in this process. One hundred and twenty eight digital images of neutral faces of ages ranging from 20 to 89 years were paired and presented to subjects who judged age and attractiveness levels while having their eye movements recorded. There was an effect of face attractiveness on age-rating accuracy, with attractive faces being rated younger than their true age. Similarly, stimulus age affected attractiveness ratings, with younger faces being perceived as more attractive. Judgments of age and attractiveness were tightly linked to fixations on the eye region, along with the nose and mouth. It is thus likely that cosmetic surgical procedures targeted at the eyes, nose, and mouth may be most efficacious at enhancing one's physical appearance

Why do we look at people's eyes?

We have previously shown that when observers are presented with complex natural scenes that contain a number of objects and people, observers look mostly at the eyes of the people. Why is this? It cannot be because eyes are merely the most salient area in a scene, as relative to other objects they are fairly inconspicuous. We hypothesized that people look at the eyes because they consider the eyes to be a rich source of information. To test this idea, we tested two groups of participants. One set of participants, called the Told Group, was informed that there would be a recognition test after they were shown the natural scenes. The second set, the Not Told Group, was not informed that there would be a subsequent recognition test. Our data showed that during the initial and test viewings, the Told Group fixated the eyes more frequently than the Not Told group, supporting the idea that the eyes are considered an informative region in social scenes. Converging evidence for this interpretation is that the Not Told Group fixated the eyes more frequently in the test session than in the study session

Eye and head movements are complementary in visual selection

In the natural environment, visual selection is accomplished by a system of nested effectors, moving the head and body within space and the eyes within the visual field. However, it is not yet known if the principles of selection for these different effectors are the same or different. We used a novel gaze-contingent display in which an asymmetric window of visibility (a horizontal or vertical slot) was yoked to either head or eye position. Participants showed highly systematic changes in behaviour, revealing clear differences in the principles underlying selection by eye and head. Eye movements were more likely to move in the direction of visible information?horizontally when viewing with a horizontal slot, and vertically with a vertical slot. Head movements showed the opposite and complementary pattern, moving to reveal new information (e.g. vertically with a horizontal slot and vice versa). These results are consistent with a nested system in which the head favours exploration of unknown regions, while the eye exploits what can be seen with finer-scale saccades

Neural correlates and perceived attractiveness of male and female shoulder-to-hip ratio in men and women: an EEG study

While there are studies regarding the neural correlates of human facial attractiveness, there are few investigations considering neural responses for body form attractiveness. The most prominent physical feature defining men's attractiveness is their physical fitness and upper body strength. Shoulder-to-hip ratio (SHR), a sexually dimorphic trait in humans, is an indicator of men's attractiveness for both men and women. The current study is the first to report on the neurophysiological responses to male and female body forms varying in SHR in healthy heterosexual men and women observers. Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals were acquired while participants completed an oddball task as well as a subsequent attractiveness judgement task. Behavioral results showed larger SHRs were considered more attractive than smaller SHRs, regardless of stimuli and participants' sex. The electrophysiological results for both the oddball task and the explicit judgement of attractiveness showed that brain activity related to male SHR body stimuli differed depending on the specific ratios, both at early and late processing stages. For female avatars, SHR did not modulate neural activity. Collectively the data implicate posterior brain regions in the perception of body forms that differ in attractiveness vis-a-vis variation of SHR, and frontal brain regions when such perceptions are rated explicitly.- This study was conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). JA receives funding from FCT Portugal through grants PTDC/MHC-PCN/4589/2012 and IF/01298/2014 and DP is supported by grant SFRH/BPD/120111/2016

Recording brain activity can function as an implied social presence and alter neural connectivity.

People often behave differently when they know they are being watched. Here, we report the first investigation of whether such social presence effects also include brain monitoring technology, and also their impacts on the measured neural activity. We demonstrate that merely informing participants that fMRI has the potential to observe (thought-related) brain activity is sufficient to trigger changes in functional connectivity within and between relevant brain networks that have been previously associated selectively with executive and attentional control as well as self-relevant processing, social cognition, and theory of mind. These results demonstrate that an implied social presence, mediated here by recording brain activity with fMRI, can alter brain functional connectivity. These data provide a new manipulation of social attention, as well as shining light on a methodological hazard for researchers using equipment to monitor brain activity

A World Unglued: Simultanagnosia As A Spatial Restriction Of Attention

Simultanagnosia is a disorder of visual attention that leaves a patient’s world unglued: scenes and objects are perceived in a piecemeal manner. It is generally agreed that simultanagnosia is related to an impairment of attention, but it is unclear whether this impairment is object- or space-based in nature. We first consider the findings that support a concept of simultanagnosia as deficit of object-based attention. We then examine the evidence suggesting that simultanagnosia results from damage to a space-based attentional system, and in particular a model of simultanagnosia as a narrowed spatial window of attention. We ask whether seemingly object-based deficits can be explained by space-based mechanisms, and consider the evidence that object processing influences spatial deficits in this condition. Finally, we discuss limitations of a space-based attentional explanation