Abstract
Eye movement recordings do not tell us whether observers are ’really looking’ or whether they are paying attention to something else than the visual environment. We want to determine whether an observer’s main current occupation is visual or not by investigating fixation patterns and EEG. Subjects were presented with auditory and visual stimuli. In some conditions, they focused on the auditory information whereas in others they searched or judged the visual stimuli. Observers made more fixations that are less cluttered in the visual compared to the auditory tasks, and they were less variable in their average fixation location. Fixated features revealed which target the observers were looking for. Gaze was not attracted more by salient features when performing the auditory task. 8-12 Hz EEG oscillations recorded over the parieto-occipital regions were stronger during the auditory task than during visual search. Our results are directly relevant for monitoring surveillance workers.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Itti, L., Koch, C.: A saliency-based search mechanism for overt and covert shifts of visual attention. Vis. Res. 40, 1489–1506 (2000)
Walther, D., Koch, C.: Modeling attention to salient proto-objects. Neural Networks 19, 1395–1407 (2006)
Over, E.A.B., Hooge, I.T.C., Erkelens, C.J.: A quantitative measure for the uniformity of fixation density: The Voronoi method. Behav. Res. Meth. 38(2), 251–261 (2006)
van Dijk, H., Schoffelen, J.M., Oostenveld, R., Jensen, O.: Pre-stimulus oscillatory activity in the alpha band predicts visual discrimination ability. J. Neurosci. 28, 1816–1823 (2008)
Foxe, J.J., Simpson, G.V., Ahlfors, S.P.: Parieto-occipital 10 Hz activity reflects anticipatory state of visual attention mechanisms. Neuroreport 9, 3929–3933 (1998)
Klimesch, W., Sauseng, P., Hanslmayr, S.: EEG alpha oscillations: the inhibition-timing hypothesis. Brain Res. Rev. 53, 63–88 (2007)
Toet, A., Bijl, P., Valeton, J.M.: Image dataset for testing search and detection models. Optical Engineering 40(9), 1760–1767 (2001)
Veltman, J.A., Gaillard, A.W.K.: Physiological workload reactions to increasing levels of task difficulty. Ergonomics 5, 656–669 (1998)
Pfurtscheller, G., Stancak Jr., A., Neuper, C.: Event-related synchronization (ERS) in the alpha band: an electrophysiological correlate of cortical idling (review). Int. J. Psychophysiol. 24, 39–46 (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Brouwer, AM., Hogervorst, M.A., Herman, P., Kooi, F. (2009). Are You Really Looking? Finding the Answer through Fixation Patterns and EEG. In: Schmorrow, D.D., Estabrooke, I.V., Grootjen, M. (eds) Foundations of Augmented Cognition. Neuroergonomics and Operational Neuroscience. FAC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5638. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02812-0_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02812-0_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02811-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02812-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)