Consider the variety of visual scenes that one might encounter over the course of a typical day, and the different ways that visual attention can be allocated from one scene to the next. From searching for keys to shopping for groceries to mingling at a party, attention must be spread over and across the objects in a person's visual environment. The distribution of visual attention is a key component of the perceptual and behavioral functions that have evolved to endow human behavior with its remarkable flexibility and adaptivity. Cognitive scientists have been studying the allocation of attention for many years, but the large majority of these studies have used relatively limited measures of attention, mostly in the context of simple, two-dimensional visual stimuli.
With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Tse will develop a new method of measuring the distribution of attention, in all three dimensions of space. This new method takes advantage of the well-established finding that, while global changes are occurring in visual scence (like the lights in a room flickering on and off), a person can detect only local changes that are being attended to (like the movement of a talker's lips). Dr. Tse has developed a way to use local change detection as a means of mapping out the allocation of attention across complex, realistic visual objects and scenes. Such "attentional maps" will provide a rich source of data for testing theories of the functional and neural bases of visual attention.
