Visual foraging and executive functions: A developmental perspective

Ólafsdóttir, Inga María; Gestsdóttir, Steinunn; Kristjánsson, Árni

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.01.005

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…The authors called these individuals "super-foragers". Follow-up studies have shown that although these individual differences in foraging behaviour are linked to cognitive abilities in children (Ólafsdóttir, Gestsdóttir, & Kristjánsson, 2019;Ólafsdóttir, Kristjánsson, Gestsdóttir, Jóhannesson, & Kristjánsson, 2016), such correlations have not been observed for adults (Jóhannesson, Kristjánsson, & Thornton, 2017), suggesting that other factors are involved. In the end, although these findings revealed that animal and human foraging are driven by similar mechanisms and proceed in a similar way, the individual differences arising in humans' behaviour are still poorly understood, highlighting that many mechanisms guiding visual foraging are still unknown.…”

Section: Visual Foragingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of attentional and oculomotor orienting in visual foraging tasks

Tagu

Kristjánsson

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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A vast amount of research has been carried out to understand how humans visually search for targets in their environment. However, this research has typically involved search for one unique target among several distractors. Although this line of research has yielded important insights into the basic characteristics of how humans explore their visual environment, this may not be a very realistic model for everyday visual orientation. Recently, researchers have used multi-target displays to assess orienting in the visual field. Eye movements in such tasks are, however, less well understood. Here, we investigated oculomotor dynamics during four visual foraging tasks differing in target crypticity (feature-based foraging vs. conjunction-based foraging) and the effector type being used for target selection (mouse foraging vs. gaze foraging). Our results show that both target crypticity and effector type affect foraging strategies. These changes are reflected in oculomotor dynamics, feature foraging being associated with focal exploration (long fixations and short-amplitude saccades), and conjunction foraging with ambient exploration (short fixations and high-amplitude saccades). These results provide important new information for existing accounts of visual attention and oculomotor control and emphasise the usefulness of foraging tasks for a better understanding of how humans orient in the visual environment.

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Section: Visual Foragingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of attentional and oculomotor orienting in visual foraging tasks

Tagu

Kristjánsson

2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…Again, this shows how active tasks can inform theoretical accounts. Foraging studies have also been used to shed new light on the development of WM, along with other executive functions (Ólafsdóttir, Gestsdóttir, & Kristjánsson, 2019, 2020.…”

Section: Foraging and Visual Working Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Keeping it real: Looking beyond capacity limits in visual cognition

Kristjánsson

Draschkow

2021

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Research within visual cognition has made tremendous strides in uncovering the basic operating characteristics of the visual system by reducing the complexity of natural vision to artificial but well-controlled experimental tasks and stimuli. This reductionist approach has for example been used to assess the basic limitations of visual attention, visual working memory (VWM) capacity, and the fidelity of visual long-term memory (VLTM). The assessment of these limits is usually made in a pure sense, irrespective of goals, actions, and priors. While it is important to map out the bottlenecks our visual system faces, we focus here on selected examples of how such limitations can be overcome. Recent findings suggest that during more natural tasks, capacity may be higher than reductionist research suggests and that separable systems subserve different actions, such as reaching and looking, which might provide important insights about how pure attentional or memory limitations could be circumvented. We also review evidence suggesting that the closer we get to naturalistic behavior, the more we encounter implicit learning mechanisms that operate “for free” and “on the fly.” These mechanisms provide a surprisingly rich visual experience, which can support capacity-limited systems. We speculate whether natural tasks may yield different estimates of the limitations of VWM, VLTM, and attention, and propose that capacity measurements should also pass the real-world test within naturalistic frameworks. Our review highlights various approaches for this and suggests that our understanding of visual cognition will benefit from incorporating the complexities of real-world cognition in experimental approaches.

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“…[83][84][85] Eye movement measures may also hold such future roles in the treatment in schizophrenia. Some eye movement characteristics, such as exploratory eye movements, are known to change with development 86 and can be changed with reinforcement learning. 87 Perhaps by combining findings from recent mathematical models of visual search and exploration 88-90 , development of "eye movement training programs" for schizophrenia aimed at improving visual cognition or social functioning may become possible in the future.…”

Section: Ethical Issues For Large Scale Collaboration Standardized Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movement characteristics in schizophrenia: A recent update with clinical implications

Morita

Miura

Kasai

et al. 2019

Neuropsychopharm Rep

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Eye movements are indispensable for the collection of visual information in everyday life. Many findings regarding the neural basis of eye movements have been accumulated from neurophysiological and psychophysical studies. In the field of psychiatry, studies on eye movement characteristics in mental illnesses have been conducted since the early 1900s. Participants with schizophrenia are known to have characteristic eye movements during smooth pursuit, saccade control, and visual search. Recently, studies evaluating eye movement characteristics as biomarkers for schizophrenia have attracted considerable attention. In this article, we review the neurophysiological basis of eye movement control and eye movement characteristics in schizophrenia. Furthermore, we discuss the prospects for eye movements as biomarkers for mental illnesses.

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Visual foraging and executive functions: A developmental perspective

Cited by 20 publications

References 57 publications

Dynamics of attentional and oculomotor orienting in visual foraging tasks

Dynamics of attentional and oculomotor orienting in visual foraging tasks

Keeping it real: Looking beyond capacity limits in visual cognition

Eye movement characteristics in schizophrenia: A recent update with clinical implications

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