Two visual systems in monitoring of dynamic traffic: effects of visual disruption.

Studies from neurophysiology and neuropsychology provide support for two separate object- and location-based visual systems, ventral and dorsal. In the driving context, a study was conducted using a change detection paradigm to explore drivers' ability to monitor the dynamic traffic flow, and the effects of visual disruption on these two visual systems. While driving, a discrete change, such as vehicle location, color, or identity, was occasionally made in one of the vehicles on the road ahead of the driver. Experiment results show that without visual disruption, all changes were detected very well; yet, these equally perceivable changes were disrupted differently by a brief blank display (150 ms): the detection of location changes was especially reduced. The disruption effects were also bigger for the parked vehicle compared to the moving ones. The findings support the different roles for two visual systems in monitoring the dynamic traffic: the "where", dorsal system, tracks vehicle spatiotemporal information on perceptual level, encoding information in a coarse and transient manner; whereas the "what", ventral system, monitors vehicles' featural information, encoding information more accurately and robustly. Both systems work together contributing to the driver's situation awareness of traffic. Benefits and limitations of using the driving simulation are also discussed.

Pay now or pay later: aging and the role of boundary salience in self-regulation of conceptual integration in sentence processing.

Previous research has suggested that older readers may self-regulate input during reading differently from the way younger readers do, so as to accommodate age-graded change in processing capacity. For example, older adults may pause more frequently for conceptual integration. Presumably, such an allocation policy would enable older readers to manage the cognitive demands of constructing a semantic representation of the text by off-loading the products of intermediate computations to long-term memory, thus decreasing memory demands as conceptual load increases. This was explicitly tested in 2 experiments measuring word-by-word reading time for sentences in which boundary salience was manipulated but in which semantic content was controlled. With both a computer-based moving-window paradigm that permits only forward eye movements, and an eye-tracking paradigm that allows measurement of regressive eye movements, we found evidence for the proposed tradeoff between early and late wrap-up. Across the 2 experiments, age groups were more similar than different in regulating processing time. However, older adults showed evidence of exaggerated early wrap-up in both experiments. These data are consistent with the notion that readers opportunistically regulate effort and that older readers can use this to good advantage to maintain comprehension.

Gaze-contingent multiresolutional displays: an integrative review.

Gaze-contingent multiresolutional displays (GCMRDs) center high-resolution information on the user's gaze position, matching the user's area of interest (AOI). Image resolution and details outside the AOI are reduced, lowering the requirements for processing resources and transmission bandwidth in demanding display and imaging applications. This review provides a general framework within which GCMRD research can be integrated, evaluated, and guided. GCMRDs (or "moving windows") are analyzed in terms of (a) the nature of their images (i.e., "multiresolution," "variable resolution," "space variant," or "level of detail"), and (b) the movement of the AOI (i.e., "gaze contingent," "foveated," or "eye slaved"). We also synthesize the known human factors research on GCMRDs and point out important questions for future research and development. Actual or potential applications of this research include flight, medical, and driving simulators; virtual reality; remote piloting and teleoperation; infrared and indirect vision; image transmission and retrieval; telemedicine; video teleconferencing; and artificial vision systems.

Word identification and eye fixation locations in visual and visual-plus-auditory presentations of spoken sentences.

In this study, we investigated where people look on talkers' faces as they try to understand what is being said. Sixteen young adults with normal hearing and demonstrated average speechreading proficiency were evaluated under two modality presentation conditions: vision only versus vision plus low-intensity sound. They were scored for the number of words correctly identified from 80 unconnected sentences spoken by two talkers. The results showed two competing tendencies: an eye primacy effect that draws the gaze to the talkers eyes during silence and an information source attraction effect that draws the gaze to the talker's mouth during speech periods. Dynamic shifts occur between eyes and mouth prior to speech onset and following the offset of speech, and saccades tend to be suppressed during speech periods. The degree to which the gaze is drawn to the mouth during speech and the degree to which saccadic activity is suppressed depend on the difficulty of the speech identification task. Under the most difficult modality presentation condition, vison only, accuracy was related to average sentence difficulty and individual proficiency in visual speech perception, but not to the proportion of gaze time directed toward the talkers mouth or toward other parts of the talker's face.

Investigating spatial vision and dynamic attentional selection using a gaze-contingent multiresolutional display.

This study examined spatial vision and attentional selection using a gaze-contingent multiresolutional display, with a dynamic, gaze-centered, high-resolution window and lower resolution periphery. Visual search times and eye movements from 15 participants in a 3 x 3 design (Window Radius x Peripheral Resolution) suggest that contrast sensitivity as a function of retinal eccentricity affects attentional selection and visual processing. Smaller windows led to longer search times and shorter saccades; lower peripheral resolution also shortened saccades (all ps < .05) as a result of avoiding fixating degraded areas. Fixation durations, although longer for smaller windows (p < .05), were unaffected by whether the next saccade went within or outside the window. These results are explained through (a) competition among potential saccade targets where above-threshold filtering reduces an object's relative salience and (b) generally disrupted visual processing.

Perception onset time during fixations in free viewing.

In this study, we investigated when visual perception begins in fixations. During picture viewing, the picture was degraded at the beginning of selected saccades and changed back to the original after varying intervals. Participants manually responded whenever they detected changes. The change-backs were undetected when they occurred <6 msec after the end of the saccade, marked by the peak of the overshoot in dual Purkinje image eyetracker data, and detection reached asymptote 32 msec after that marker. Eye velocity at the change-back time also affected detection likelihood. Apparently, perception begins around the time at which the eyes stop rotating at the end of a saccade, giving a psychological justification for measuring fixation durations from then. This also specifies the deadline for gaze-contingent display changes to occur without detectable image motion. Investigators using the dual Purkinje image eyetracker should consider the peak of the overshoot as the fixation onset time and measure intrafixational presentation times from then.