High Regularities in Eye‐Movement Patterns Reveal the Dynamics of the Visual Working Memory Allocation Mechanism

Abstract

With only two to five slots of visual working memory (VWM), humans are able to quickly solve complex visual problems to near optimal solutions. To explain the paradox between tightly constrained VWM and impressively complex human visual problem-solving ability, we propose several principles for dynamic VWM allocation. In particular, we propose that complex visual information is represented in a temporal manner using only a few slots of VWM that include global and local visual chunks. We built a model of human traveling salesman problem solving based on these principles of VWM allocation and tested the model with eye-movement data. Exactly as the model predicted, human eye movements during traveling salesman problem solving have precise quantitative regularities with regard to both the general statistical pattern of attentional fixations and how they vary across individuals with different VWM capacities. Even though VWM capacity is very limited, eye movements dynamically allocate VWM resources to both local and global information, enabling attention to fine details without loss of the big picture.

What Eye Movements Can Tell about Theory of Mind in a Strategic Game

“…Because Marble Drop has a predominantly visual interface and both strategies clearly predict a distinct succession in which the payoffs are to be compared, we employed eye tracking to measure the online (i.e., ongoing) process of ToM reasoning. Eye tracking has been used extensively in visual search tasks and reading tasks [33] , [34] , and in complex visual problem solving tasks [35] , [36] . These studies have shown correlations between eye movements, on the one hand, and cognitive processes and higher-level strategies, on the other hand.…”

Set as an Instance of a Real‐World Visual‐Cognitive Task

“…To gather real‐time behavioral data that can provide more insight into previously hidden aspects of user behavior, we decided to use eye tracking. As many studies have shown that the eye‐movement protocols directly or, at least, indirectly reflect both the cognitive processes and the amount of cognitive load (Kong, Schunn, & Wallstrom, 2010; Rayner, 1995; Salvucci, 1999), we considered eye tracking a viable choice for studying human behavior.…”

Ambiguous Proximity Distribution

“…Moreover, this work is applied to privacy protection by removing people from the scene. Inspired by Kong's work [21,22], various image representation methods have been proposed. Among them, local visual descriptors has been shown to be outperforming other visual methods [24][25][26][27][28].…”