Description

Visual perception, operating below conscious awareness, effortlessly provides the experience of a rich representation of the environment, continuous in space and time. Conscious visual perception is made possible by the 'foveal compromise,' the combination of the high-acuity fovea and a sophisticated suite of eye movements. Our illusory visual experience cannot be understood by introspection, but monitoring eye movements lets us probe the processes of visual perception. Four tasks representing a wide range of complexity were used to explore visual perception; image quality judgments, map reading, model building, and hand-washing. Very short fixation durations were observed in all tasks, some as short as 33 msec. While some tasks showed little variation in eye movement metrics, differences in eye movement patterns and high-level strategies were observed in the model building and hand-washing tasks. Performance in the hand-washing task revealed a new type of eye movement. 'Planful' eye movements were made to objects well in advance of a subject's interaction with the object. Often occurring in the middle of another task, they provide 'overlapping' temporal information about the environment providing a mechanism to produce our conscious visual experience.

Date of creation, presentation, or exhibit

6-2-2000

Comments

Copyright 2000 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in February 2014.

Document Type

Conference Paper

Department, Program, or Center

Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science (COS)

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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