Abstract
Understanding our visual world requires both looking and seeing. Dissociation of these processes can result in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness or ‘looking without seeing‘. Concomitant errors in applied settings can be serious, and even deadly. Current visual data analysis cannot differentiate between just ‘looking‘ and actual processing of visual information, i.e., ‘seeing‘. Differentiation may be possible through the examination of microsaccades; the involuntary, smallmagnitude saccadic eye movements that occur during processed visual fixation. Recent work has suggested that microsaccades are post-attentional biosignals, potentially modulated by task. Specifically, microsaccade rates decrease with increased mental task demand, and increase with growing visual task difficulty. Such findings imply that there are fundamental differences in microsaccadic activity between visual and nonvisual tasks. To evaluate this proposition, we used a high-speed eye tracker to record participants in looking for differences between two images or, doing mental arithmetic, or both tasks in combination. Results showed that microsaccade rate was significantly increased in conditions that require high visual attention, and decreased in conditions that require less visual attention. The results support microsaccadic rate reflecting visual attention, and level of visual information processing. A measure that reflects to what extent and how an operator is processing visual information represents a critical step for the application of sophisticated visual assessment to real world tasks.
Highlights
When humans attend to their surrounding environment, looking does not always equate to seeing
Our results show that microsaccade rate reflects the amount of visual attention toward a visual task
In the same way that vagal tone has been represented as being responsive to variations in cognitive load (Hancock, Meshkati, & Robertson, 1985), we have proposed and confirmed here that inhibition in microsaccade rate accompanies increases in cognitive demand
Summary
When humans attend to their surrounding environment, looking does not always equate to seeing. The implicit assumption here is that fixating an object secures visual attention and allocates mental resources. The signal turns green, but the driver fails to react As they wait, eyes directed toward a signal that is green, we can understand that they are certainly passively ‘looking‘ at the light. Eyes directed toward a signal that is green, we can understand that they are certainly passively ‘looking‘ at the light If they fail to respond, they cannot be said to have processed the change from red to green and to have ‘seen‘ the signal. The present work evaluates the utility of microsaccades as an indicator of visual attention and its underlying sensory and physiological processes in order to distinguish between looking from seeing by using a replicable and quantitative measure. Microsaccades will be investigated as possible indicators of such a process of resources allocation
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