Abstract
Understanding the way humans inform themselves about their environment is pivotal in helping explain our susceptibility to stimuli and how this modulates behaviour and movement patterns. We present a new device, the Human Interfaced Personal Observation Platform (HIPOP), which is a head-mounted (typically on a hat) unit that logs magnetometry and accelerometry data at high rates and, following appropriate calibration, can be used to determine the heading and pitch of the wearer’s head. We used this device on participants visiting a botanical garden and noted that although head pitch ranged between −80° and 60°, 25% confidence limits were restricted to an arc of about 25° with a tendency for the head to be pitched down (mean head pitch ranged between −43° and 0°). Mean rates of change of head pitch varied between −0.00187°/0.1 s and 0.00187°/0.1 s, markedly slower than rates of change of head heading which varied between −0.3141°/0.1 s and 0.01263°/0.1 s although frequency distributions of both parameters showed them to be symmetrical and monomodal. Overall, there was considerable variation in both head pitch and head heading, which highlighted the role that head orientation might play in exposing people to certain features of the environment. Thus, when used in tandem with accurate position-determining systems, the HIPOP can be used to determine how the head is orientated relative to gravity and geographic North and in relation to geographic position, presenting data on how the environment is being ‘framed’ by people in relation to environmental content.
Highlights
Aristotle is reported to have said “sight. . . is the sense yielding the most knowledge and excelling in differentiation” (Jonas, 1954; Nasar, Hecht & Wener, 2008), so it is little surprising that such a substantial part of the human brain is used for processing visual information (Mishkin, Ungerleider & Macko, 1983)
After body orientation, which may cover up to the full 360◦ of both pitch and heading, the head attitude has a movement arc of almost 180◦ with respect to the body attitude (Fig. 13)
With any particular environmental frame, given by the head attitude, the six muscles controlling the movement of human eyes (Kolb, Fernandez & Nelson, 2007) allow eyes to scan this frame both horizontally and vertically
Summary
Aristotle is reported to have said “sight. . . is the sense yielding the most knowledge and excelling in differentiation” (Jonas, 1954; Nasar, Hecht & Wener, 2008), so it is little surprising that such a substantial part of the human brain is used for processing visual information (Mishkin, Ungerleider & Macko, 1983). It is of little surprise that vision plays such a pivotal role in structuring human perception of the environment (Hansen & Ji, 2010) and in affecting behaviour (Cerrolaza, Villanueva & Cabeza, 2012). The pivotal nature of vision in studies examining how humans move and behave has led to research efforts that try to identify the visual attention given to objects within the environment (Arrington et al, 2000). Despite the relevance of all three, the most common method for investigating the natural performance of eyes is ‘eye tracking,’ which traditionally uses a camera to determine the orientation of the eye (Cleveland, Cleveland & Norloff, 1993) and produces metrics of natural eye movements such as ‘fixations’ and ‘scanpaths’ (Cooke, 2005). Improvements in eye-tracking type techniques have resulted in a plethora of publications which have allowed characterisation of eye movement, and examination of perceptual span and eye movement control (Rayner, 1998) and show the power of this rapidly expanding field (Duchowski, 2002)
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