Left–Right and Upper–Lower Visual Field Asymmetries for Face Matching, Letter Naming, and Lexical Decision

Hagenbeek, Rogier E.; Strien, Jan W. Van

doi:10.1006/brcg.2001.1481

Cited by 49 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(38 reference statements)

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“…In accordance with the studies showing a lower-upper asymmetry in the visual field (Green et al, 2014;Hagenbeek & Van Strien, 2002;Pitzalis & Di Russo, 2001), we found greater differences in gaze patterns when the trajectories were flipped vertically. The differences between flipped scan patterns were complex, such that a simple overall shift of the flip axis did not reduce differences between groups of scan patterns.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Flipping the stimulus: Effects on scanpath coherence?

2016

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In experiments investigating dynamic tasks, it is often useful to examine eye movement scan patterns. We can present trials repeatedly and compute within-subjects/conditions similarity in order to distinguish between signal and noise in gaze data. To avoid obvious repetitions of trials, filler trials must be added to the experimental protocol, resulting in long experiments. Alternatively, trials can be modified to reduce the chances that the participant will notice the repetition, while avoiding significant changes in the scan patterns. In tasks in which the stimuli can be geometrically transformed without any loss of meaning, flipping the stimuli around either of the axes represents a candidate modification. In this study, we examined whether flipping of stimulus object trajectories around the x-and y-axes resulted in comparable scan patterns in a multiple object tracking task. We developed two new strategies for the statistical comparison of similarity between two groups of scan patterns, and then tested those strategies on artificial data. Our results suggest that although the scan patterns in flipped trials differ significantly from those in the original trials, this difference is small (as little as a 13 % increase of overall distance). Therefore, researchers could use geometric transformations to test more complex hypotheses regarding scan pattern coherence while retaining the same duration for experiments.Keywords Eye movements . Scanpath . Group similarity . Correlation distanceIn natural tasks, humans direct their eyes toward objects of interest to make the best use of the high acuity vision in the fovea. Many factors influence eye movements. However, it is possible to get consistent scan patterns and, therefore, to separate signal from noise if the stimuli are presented repeatedly. However, repetition introduces the risk that the participants will recognize the repeated scenes and alter their gaze behavior. In many tasks, repeated presentation of the same scene is undesirable, because some subjects will recognize the scene and examine previously unexplored areas, encode additional details, and/or find targets more efficiently on the basis of their previous experience. Dorr, Martinetz, Gegenfurtner, and Barth (2010) compared the variability of eye movements during free viewing of dynamic natural scenes and found that whereas between-subjects coherence was maximal at the first presentation of the movie, it decreased during later presentations throughout the day. Dorr et al. suggested that this decrease in the between-subjects coherence was caused by a rising influence of individual viewing strategies. Gaze patterns are even affected when the stimulus is not explicitly recognized. In studies on contextual cueing, Chun and Jiang (1998) showed that people implicitly learn the positions of targets over time, which then results in shorter response times.One way to decrease the chance that participants will recognize the repetition is to increase the number of filler trials. The disadvantage of this a...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Flipping the stimulus: Effects on scanpath coherence?

2016

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“…These LVF and UVF differences in Drosophila are not an exception. In humans and nonhuman primates, it has been shown that some visual attributes are differentially processed in the LVF and UVF (19,20) and that the attentional resolution is finer in the LVF (21).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attracting the attention of a fly

Sareen

Wolf

Heisenberg

2011

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

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Organisms with complex visual systems rarely respond to just the sum of all visual stimuli impinging on their eyes. Often, they restrict their responses to stimuli in a temporarily selected region of the visual field (selective visual attention). Here, we investigate visual attention in the fly Drosophila during tethered flight at a torque meter. Flies can actively shift their attention; however, their attention can be guided to a certain location by external cues. Using visual cues, we can direct the attention of the fly to one or the other of the two visual half-fields. The cue can precede the test stimulus by several seconds and may also be spatially separated from the test by at least 20°and yet attract attention. This kind of external guidance of attention is found only in the lower visual field.focus of attention | landing response | turning behavior | upper and lower visual field F ocusing on one source of sensory inputs to the exclusion of others is termed selective attention (1). Attention suppresses part of the incoming sensory information and allows only that from a particular source to be processed further. The need for attention is most obvious in vision because the visual field is often cluttered with many singularities, each one with its special potential significance for the subject. Attention has been compared to a "spotlight" (2) or a "zoom lens" (3). Typically, a human subject is said to shift its attention to a certain location by turning its gaze in that direction, but even without a shift of gaze, it can direct its attention voluntarily to any location in the visual field, as was already observed by Helmholtz (4) in the 19th century. Moreover, visual attention can be steered by external cues even if the subject is not conscious of them (5).Like in humans, the focus of attention in other animals can also be attracted to arbitrary locations in the visual field. It is revealed by improved visual performance such as higher accuracy, shorter response times, and lower thresholds of neurons in the corresponding projection area of the brain. This property of visual systems has been intensely studied in humans and other mammals (6-8).Insects can also restrict their behavioral responses to the stimuli in certain parts of the visual field (9), conforming to the operational definition of visual attention above. This property has been studied in flying Drosophila at the torque meter (10, 11). Because flies cannot move their eyes and, at the torque meter, their head and thorax are fixed in space, this preparation is particularly well suited for the study of visual attention. If, for instance, a vertical dark stripe is presented to a fly in a frontolateral position and is slowly oscillated around this position, the fly's yaw torque shows a characteristic modulation. During the front-to-back movement of the stripe, the fly generates a strong torque response in the same direction as the stimulus motion, whereas during back-to-front motion, the response in the opposite direction builds up much more slowly an...

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“…There nevertheless are good reasons to believe that reading vertically is less efficient than reading horizontally. Nonreading studies have suggested that oculomotor control is poorer in the vertical than in the horizontal plane (Collewijn, Erkelens, & Steinman, 1988), and that asymmetries in upper-and lower-hemifield sensitivities to visual and linguistic information might impair vertical reading (e.g., Goldstein & Babkoff, 2001;Hagenbeek & Van Strien, 2002;Yu, Legge, Wagoner, & Chung, 2014). However, investigations of reading direction effects in alphabetic languages have been confounded by readers' unfamiliarity with vertical text (Huey, 1898;Schmidt, Ullrich, & Rossner, 1993;Tinker, 1955;Yu, Park, Gerold, & Legge, 2010), and the limited evidence available to date has come from studies with characterbased languages, such as Japanese, that commonly use both horizontal and vertical text formats (Osaka & Oda, 1991).…”

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confidence: 99%

Flexibility in the perceptual span during reading: Evidence from Mongolian

Guo-en

Bai

et al. 2020

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Readers can acquire useful information from only a narrow region of text around each fixation (the perceptual span), which extends asymmetrically in the direction of reading. Studies with bilingual readers have additionally shown that this asymmetry reverses with changes in horizontal reading direction. However, little is known about the perceptual span's flexibility following orthogonal (vertical vs. horizontal) changes in reading direction, because of the scarcity of vertical writing systems and because changes in reading direction often are confounded with text orientation. Accordingly, we assessed effects in a language (Mongolian) that avoids this confound, in which text is conventionally read vertically but can also be read horizontally. Sentences were presented normally or in a gaze-contingent paradigm in which a restricted region of text was displayed normally around each fixation and other text was degraded. The perceptual span effects on reading rates were similar in both reading directions. These findings therefore provide a unique (nonconfounded) demonstration of perceptual span flexibility.

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Left–Right and Upper–Lower Visual Field Asymmetries for Face Matching, Letter Naming, and Lexical Decision

Cited by 49 publications

References 21 publications

Flipping the stimulus: Effects on scanpath coherence?

Flipping the stimulus: Effects on scanpath coherence?

Attracting the attention of a fly

Flexibility in the perceptual span during reading: Evidence from Mongolian

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