Adaptive Allocation of Vision under Competing Task Demands

Sims, Chris R.; Jacobs, Robert A.; Knill, David C.

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.4240-10.2011

Cited by 18 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…The behavioral results described by Miller are thus consistent with the view that the precision in the neural coding of information at the sensory and perceptual levels might contribute to the variations in our abilities to make absolute judgements across different dimensions of stimuli in different sensory modalities. This view is consistent with the ideal observer model of visual working memory proposed by Sims and colleagues (Sims, Jacobs, & Knill, 2011, which considers the distortion (the difference in precision between input and output signals) and the quantity of information that can be processed by a memory system to be fundamental determinants of memory performance.…”

Section: Absolute Judgementssupporting

confidence: 86%

Human short-term spatial memory: Precision predicts capacity

Lavenex

Boujon

Ndarugendamwo

et al. 2015

Cognitive Psychology

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Here, we aimed to determine the capacity of human short-term memory for allocentric spatial information in a real-world setting. Young adults were tested on their ability to learn, on a trial-unique basis, and remember over a 1-min interval the location(s) of 1, 3, 5, or 7 illuminating pads, among 23 pads distributed in a 4 m Â 4 m arena surrounded by curtains on three sides. Participants had to walk to and touch the pads with their foot to illuminate the goal locations. In contrast to the predictions from classical slot models of working memory capacity limited to a fixed number of items, i.e., Miller's magical number 7 or Cowan's magical number 4, we found that the number of visited locations to find the goals was consistently about 1.6 times the number of goals, whereas the number of correct choices before erring and the number of errorless trials varied with memory load even when memory load was below the hypothetical memory capacity. In contrast to resource models of visual working memory, we found no evidence that memory resources were evenly distributed among unlimited numbers of items to be remembered. Instead, we found that memory E-mail address: pamela.bantalavenex@unil.ch (P. Banta Lavenex).for even one individual location was imprecise, and that memory performance for one location could be used to predict memory performance for multiple locations. Our findings are consistent with a theoretical model suggesting that the precision of the memory for individual locations might determine the capacity of human shortterm memory for spatial information.

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Section: Absolute Judgementssupporting

confidence: 86%

Human short-term spatial memory: Precision predicts capacity

Lavenex

Boujon

Ndarugendamwo

et al. 2015

Cognitive Psychology

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“…Although many factors may contribute to this variability in action outcomes, humans have been shown to take this variability into account (30). Further evidence for this comes from experiments that have shown that in a reproduction task the impact of prior knowledge on behavior increased according to the uncertainty in time estimation (31) and studies that extended an ideal observer to an ideal actor by including behavioral timing variability (32). To describe the variability of fixation durations we used an exponential Gaussian distribution (33) because it is a common choice for describing fixation durations (34)(35)(36)(37).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning rational temporal eye movement strategies

Hoppe

Rothkopf

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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During active behavior humans redirect their gaze several times every second within the visual environment. Where we look within static images is highly efficient, as quantified by computational models of human gaze shifts in visual search and face recognition tasks. However, when we shift gaze is mostly unknown despite its fundamental importance for survival in a dynamic world. It has been suggested that during naturalistic visuomotor behavior gaze deployment is coordinated with taskrelevant events, often predictive of future events, and studies in sportsmen suggest that timing of eye movements is learned. Here we establish that humans efficiently learn to adjust the timing of eye movements in response to environmental regularities when monitoring locations in the visual scene to detect probabilistically occurring events. To detect the events humans adopt strategies that can be understood through a computational model that includes perceptual and acting uncertainties, a minimal processing time, and, crucially, the intrinsic costs of gaze behavior. Thus, subjects traded off event detection rate with behavioral costs of carrying out eye movements. Remarkably, based on this rational bounded actor model the time course of learning the gaze strategies is fully explained by an optimal Bayesian learner with humans' characteristic uncertainty in time estimation, the wellknown scalar law of biological timing. Taken together, these findings establish that the human visual system is highly efficient in learning temporal regularities in the environment and that it can use these regularities to control the timing of eye movements to detect behaviorally relevant events.eye movements | computational modeling | decision making | learning | visual attention W e live in a dynamic and ever-changing environment. To avoid missing crucial events, we need to constantly use new sensory information to monitor our surroundings. However, the fraction of the visual environment that can be perceived at a given moment is limited by the placement of the eyes and the arrangement of the receptor cells within the eyes (1). Thus, continuously monitoring environmental locations, even when we know which regions in space contain relevant information, is unfeasible. Instead, we actively explore by targeting the visual apparatus toward regions of interest using proper movements of the eyes, head, and body (2-5). This constitutes a fundamental computational problem requiring humans to decide sequentially when to look where. Solving this problem arguably has been crucial to our survival from the early human hunters pursuing a herd of prey and avoiding predators to the modern human navigating a crowded sidewalk and crossing a busy road.So far, the emphasis of most studies on eye movements has been on spatial gaze selection. Its exquisite adaptability can be appreciated by considering the different factors influencing gaze, including low-level image features (6), scene gist (7) and scene semantics (8), task constraints (9), and extrinsic rewards (10); al...

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“…In both studies, human performance was optimal in the sense that subjects chose the initiation time that maximized the probability of hitting the target. Humans also trade off the amount of time fixating the object of a reach and the goal where that object will next be placed based on the acuity requirements of each sub-task [14]. …”

Section: The Cost Of Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Motor control is decision-making

Wolpert

Landy

2012

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

307

204

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Motor behavior may be viewed as a problem of maximizing the utility of movement outcome in the face of sensory, motor and task uncertainty. Viewed in this way, and allowing for the availability of prior knowledge in the form of a probability distribution over possible states of the world, the choice of a movement plan and strategy for motor control becomes an application of statistical decision theory. This point of view has proven successful in recent years in accounting for movement under risk, inferring the loss function used in motor tasks, and explaining motor behavior in a wide variety of circumstances.

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Adaptive Allocation of Vision under Competing Task Demands

Cited by 18 publications

References 57 publications

Human short-term spatial memory: Precision predicts capacity

Human short-term spatial memory: Precision predicts capacity

Learning rational temporal eye movement strategies

Motor control is decision-making

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