Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speakers:  Tom Foulsham (University of Essex)

Topic: Appearance and Reality in Eye Movement Research

Abstract: Human visual attention evolved within a complex environment, where  priorities change frequently, and we must interact with other people and objects. I will describe recent research where we monitor attention using eye tracking in natural scenes, videos and during real world action and interaction. My focus will be on comparing what we look at in pictures to the way that gaze is deployed in complex natural tasks and environments. I will consider two examples of why results from picture viewing are not as straightforward as they might seem. First, in social settings, eye gaze is both a mechanism for focused attention and a signal to other people. Although we are highly likely to attend to eyes and faces in an image, different patterns are observed in dynamic stimuli, and particularly in real situations such as a waiting room where we often avoid looking at each other. Second, the way that we perceive objects, including how we deploy our fixations, is critically affected by affordance and our ability to act. These experiments demonstrate that humans are highly sensitive to the real—and social— context of a situation, something of which we should be mindful when generalizing from laboratory research.