Eye-tracking study of animate objects

Abstract

This study involved presentation of animate objects under labeling and non-labeling conditions and examination of participants' looking pattern across these conditions. Results revealed a surprisingly consistent way in which adults look at the pictures of animate objects. The head/eyes of the animals were a typical region attracting a number of fixations, but also some other parts of animals (e.g. the tail in cats, or the udder in cows and the body in snakes). Furthermore, not only did participants tend to look at similar regions of the pictures of animate objects, but also the looking order to these regions was consistent across participants. However, contrary to the original predictions, these patterns of fixations were similar across the naming and non-naming conditions ('Look at the <target>!', 'Look at the picture!' and 'What's this?', respectively), which led to the conclusion that participants' consistency in processing animate objects was not reflecting underlying mental representation evoked by labels, but was rather driven by the structural similarity of animate objects, in particular the presence of a head.

Robust object recognition in wearable eye tracking system

“…There is a significant body of work regarding human attention, analyzing eye movement through eye tracking [3,5,13,7]. Toyama et al use eye tracking glasses as interface device for Augmented Reality in an automatic guided tour application [11].…”

The relation between gaze behavior and categorization: Does where we look determine what we see?

“…The response patterns observed in these two studies (Georgiades & Harris, 1997;Kovic et al, 2009) seem counterintuitive because expectations of the upcoming event play an important role in our gaze behavior (Hunnius & Bekkering, 2010;Land, Mennie, & Rusted, 1999). For instance, in studying gaze when performing procedural tasks, Land et al (1999) noted that when making tea, the eyes are directed to the location important for the next step in executing the action.…”

“…to influence the relation between categorization and gaze behavior by either manipulating categorization or gaze behavior. Kovic, Plunkett, and Westermann (2009), for instance, investigated the relation between categorization and gaze behavior by examining the effect of mental representations on the gaze behavior of animate objects. The object (e.g., a picture of a cat) that was to be scanned was preceded by a sentence that could either be ''look at the picture,'' ''what's this?''…”

Gaze guided object recognition using a head-mounted eye tracker

“…Research over the last century has contributed to understanding the nature of human attention by analyzing eye movements using eye tracking [Buswell 1935;Henderson 2003;Yarbus 1967;Kovic et al 2009]. As a result, eye tracking itself has emerged as a new technology to interact with computers.…”