Primates demonstrate unparalleled ability at rapidly orienting towards important events in complex dynamic environments. During rapid guidance of attention and gaze towards potential objects of interest or threats, often there is no time for detailed visual analysis. Thus, heuristic computations are necessary to locate the most interesting events in quasi real-time. We present a new theory of sensory surprise, which provides a principled and computable shortcut to important information. We develop a model that computes instantaneous low-level surprise at every location in video streams. The algorithm significantly correlates with eye movements of two humans watching complex video clips, including television programs (17,936 frames, 2,152 saccadic gaze shifts). The system allows more sophisticated and time-consuming image analysis to be efficiently focused onto the most surprising subsets of the incoming data. 1.

this paper a statistical framework for incorporating contextual information in the search task is proposed

This paper describes three experiments that investigate the ability of humans to perform high-speed visual estimation. This work is part of an ongoing study of techniques which allow rapid and accurate visualization of large multidimensional datasets. Scientific visualization in computer graphics is a relatively new field of research. The term "visualization" was used by a 1987 panel sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) discussing how to apply computer science to data analysis problems (McCormick et al., 1987). The panel defined the "domain of visualization" to include the development of general purpose tools and the study of research problems that arise in the process. A variety of methods have been used to convert raw data into a more usable visual format. Both Tufte

Spatial attention: Visual selection and deployment over space The attentional spotlight and spatial cueing Attentional shifts, splits, and resolution Object-based Selection The visual search paradigm Top-down and bottom-up control of attention Inhibitory mechanisms of attention Invalid cueing Negative priming Inhibition of return Temporal attention: Visual selection and deployment over time Single target search Attentional blink and attentional dwell time Repetition blindness NEURAL MECHANISMS OF SELECTION Single-cell physiological method Event-related potentials Functional imaging: PET and fMRI

Management of clutter is an important factor in the design of user interfaces and information visualizations, allowing improved usability and aesthetics. However, clutter is not a well defined concept. In this paper, we present the Feature Congestion measure of display clutter. This measure is based upon extensive modeling of the saliency of elements of a display, and upon a new operational definition of clutter. The current implementation is based upon two features: color and luminance contrast. We have tested this measure on maps that observers ranked by perceived clutter. Results show good agreement between the observers ’ rankings and our measure of clutter. Furthermore, our measure can be used to make design suggestions in an automated UI critiquing tool. Author Keywords Clutter, visualization, feature congestion, visual interfaces,

This paper presents the case for a functional account of vision. A variety of studies have consistently revealed “change blindness ” or insensitivity to changes in the visual scene during an eye movement. These studies indicate that only a small part of the information in the scene is represented in the brain from moment to moment. It is still unclear, however, exactlywhat is included in visual representations. This paper reviews experiments using an extended visuo-motor task, showing that display changes affect performance differently depending on the observer’s place in the task. These effects are revealed by increases in fixation duration following a change. Different task-dependent increases suggest that the visual system represents only the information that is necessary for the immediate visual task. This allows a principled exploration of the stimulus properties that are included in the internal visual representation. The task specificity also has a more general implication that vision should be conceptualized as an active process executing special purpose “routines ” that compute only the currently necessary information. Evidence for this view and its implications for visual representations are discussed. Comparison of the change blindness phenomenon and fixation durations shows that conscious report does not reveal the extent of the representations computed by the routines.

The authors investigated whether effects of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) are influenced by salience asymmetries, independent of associations. Two series of experiments analyzed unique effects of salience by using nonassociated, neutral categories that differed in salience. In a 3rd series, salience asymmetries were manipulated experimentally while holding associations between categories constant. In a 4th series, valent associations of the target categories were manipulated experimentally while holding salience asymmetries constant. Throughout, IAT effects were found to depend on salience asymmetries. Additionally, salience asymmetries between categories were assessed directly with a visual search task to provide an independent criterion of salience asymmetries. Salience asymmetries corresponded to IAT effects and also accounted for common variance in IAT effects and explicit measures of attitudes or the self-concept.

Observers, searching for targets among distractor items, guide attention with a mix of top-down information—based on observers ’ knowledge—and bottom-up information—stimulus-based and largely independent of that knowledge. There are 2 types of top-down guidance: explicit information (e.g., verbal description) and implicit priming by preceding targets (top-down because it implies knowledge of previous searches). Experiments 1 and 2 separate bottom-up and top-down contributions to singleton search. Experiment 3 shows that priming effects are based more strongly on target than on distractor identity. Experiments 4 and 5 show that more difficult search for one type of target (color) can impair search for other types (size, orientation). Experiment 6 shows that priming guides attention and does not just modulate response. When you look at Figure 1, your attention is probably attracted to the spiky diamond. It is a salient item, and, all else being equal, salient items that are different from their neighbors tend to attract attention (Egeth, 1977; Julesz, 1986; Moraglia, 1989). The information that guided your attention to that item can be labeled as bottom-up—meaning that it did not depend on the observer’s

this paper, we report on new work that derives from an area of cognitive psychology known as preattentive processing. This work is part of an on-going investigation whose goal is a set of guidelines for visualization design.

this paper (see summary in Fig 4), the "preattentive dt " tasks that result in parallel visual search seem to rely on neuronal selectivities present in early visual areas (e.g. orientation, color), while those that result in serial visual search probably rely on higher-level neuronal selectivities (color-orientation conjunctions, animals, faces). These differences in neuronal selectivities are usually accompanied by differences in the size of the neuronal receptive fields (Desimone et al, 1988). Thus we propose that the extent to which our "preattentive dt " features can be discriminated in parallel is an inverse function of the receptive field size of the neurons that represent this feature. At higher levels of the ventral hierarchy, only very few "features" can be processed in parallel, and the corresponding stimuli must be well enough separated to avoid having a target and a distractor falling within a single receptive field. This could explain why a recent study by Rousselet et al (2002) found that 2 natural scenes can be processed in parallel (in an "animal vs. non-animal" Figure 4. Summary of results and hypothesis. A. Two independent dimensions are needed to account for the variety of visual discrimination tasks: one with respect to visual search performance (the "parallel vs