Spatiotemporal Characteristics of 360-Degree Basic Attention

Abstract

The spatiotemporal characteristics of basic attention are important for understanding attending behaviours in real-life situations, and they are useful for evaluating the accessibility of visual information. However, although people are encircled by their 360-degree surroundings in real life, no study has addressed the general characteristics of attention to 360-degree surroundings. Here, we conducted an experiment using virtual reality technology to examine the spatiotemporal characteristics of attention in a highly controlled basic visual context consisting of a 360-degree surrounding. We measured response times and gaze patterns during the 360-degree search task and examined the spatial distribution of attention and its temporal variations in a 360-degree environment based on the participants’ physical position. Data were collected from both younger adults and older adults to consider age-related differences. The results showed the fundamental spatiotemporal characteristics of 360-degree attention, which can be used as basic criteria to analyse the structure of exogenous effects on attention in complex 360-degree surroundings in real-life situations. For practical purposes, we created spherical criteria maps of 360-degree attention, which are useful for estimating attending behaviours to 360-degree environmental information or for evaluating visual information design in living environments, workspaces, or other real-life contexts.

The effect of task-irrelevant spatial contexts on 360-degree attention

“…The trial sequence was based on Harada & Ohyama [31] ( Fig 1C). At the beginning of a trial, the participants oriented their bodies toward and fixated on the center of a white cross superimposed on a black square (90 × 90 degrees of visual angle).…”

“…Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. The sample size was determined on the basis of Harada & Ohyama [31]. A post-hoc power test with G � Power showed that the power was .729.…”

“…These studies have suggested that 360-degree attention has context-dependent characteristics. On the other hand, basic characteristics in 360-degree attention was investigated by using a uniform visual environment without salient features (i.e., grey-colored background) [31]. The basic characteristic might be induced by endogenous factors in simple uniform contexts, and the context-dependent characteristic might be induced by exogenous factors of specific contexts such as saliency.…”

A Case for Studying Naturalistic Eye and Head Movements in Virtual Environments

“…Eye tracking has been an essential component in understanding how the visual system acquires information from a scene to build our internal perception. Measuring where the eyes foveate in a scene has been demonstrated in VR with HMD systems (Clay et al, 2019) and has given insight into how scene gist influences eye fixations during search (Boettcher et al, 2018) as well as how bottom-up and top-down influences guide the deployment of attention (Anderson et al, 2015;Harada and Ohyama, 2019). How the eyes move around a scene also provides important insight into cognitive processes (Williams and Castelhano, 2019) as well as clinical applications (Baloh et al, 1975;Terao et al, 2017;Ward and Kapoula, 2020).…”

Quantitative evaluation of visual guidance effects for 360-degree directions

“…For example, humans tend to pay attention to the leftward (pseudo-neglect phenomenon: Jewell and McCourt, 2000;Zago et al 2017). Moreover, it is more difficult to pay attention to the surroundings slightly over the head and back of users (Harada and Ohyama 2019). Regarding the second issue, few studies have quantitatively measured cognitive loads for guidance in a 360-degree environment.…”