C-Lab

On Monday 25th of January we will have a C-Lab seminar with mgr Marek Pędziwiatr.

Title Investigating the role of image meaning and prior knowledge in human eye-movements control

Abstract Humans sample visual information by making eye movements towards different parts of their surroundings. Understanding what guides this sampling process is an important goal of vision science. The factors that are thought to influence eye movements are typically divided into bottom-up (stimulus-dependent) and top-down (observer-dependent) processes. One major challenge in studying the contributions of these factors is the difficulty to tease them apart and operationalize them in a precise, unambiguous way. This is particularly problematic for semantic information contained in visual scenes (‘image meaning’), a top-down factor which is the backbone of the recently proposed framework for understanding human eye movements: the meaning maps approach. In the first part of my talk, I will present experiments evaluating this approach and demonstrating that meaning maps and contextualized meaning maps – two crowd-sourced methods designed to quantify the distribution of meaning in natural scenes – are sensitive to complex visual features, rather than meaning per se. In the second part of my talk, I will adopt a novel perspective on eye movements control, focusing on the interactions between image features (a bottom-up factor) and prior object-knowledge possessed by an observer (a top-down factor). These considerations will be illustrated by experimental results showing that the same stimuli – black and white, Mooney-style two-tone images – are looked at differently depending on whether the observers possess object-knowledge enabling binding these images into the coherent percepts of objects or not.