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Temporal and peripheral extraction of contextual cues from scenes during visual search
Kathryn Koehler1, Miguel P Eckstein2
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USAkoehler@umail.ucsb.edu.
Journal of Vision
|March 1, 2017
Summary
Object configuration guides initial visual search, while co-occurring objects refine guidance and reduce bias. Peripheral vision effectively extracts object cues, but background context offers limited search value.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Neuroscience
- Computer Vision
Background:
- Scene context significantly aids object recognition and visual search.
- Limited research has isolated image-based cues and their impact on eye movements and search performance.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the contributions of three contextual cues (object configuration, co-occurring objects, background category) to visual search.
- To assess cue-combination and temporal extraction of contextual information.
- To determine if peripheral visual cue extraction limits cue utilization and search performance.
Main Methods:
- Experimental manipulation of contextual cues in visual search tasks.
- Analysis of eye movement data to track search guidance.
- Evaluation of decision accuracy and bias under different cue conditions.
- Assessment of peripheral cue extraction capabilities.
Main Results:
- Object configuration initially guides eye movements; co-occurring objects provide finer guidance later.
- Absence of context induced a bias towards reporting targets as absent.
- Co-occurring objects were the only cue to significantly reduce decision bias.
- Object cues are extractable up to 16° in the visual periphery.
- Background cues were not utilized for search guidance, despite peripheral availability.
Conclusions:
- Visual search relies on a temporal hierarchy of contextual cue utilization.
- Co-occurring object information is crucial for reducing search bias.
- Peripheral vision supports early visual search guidance, but background context is less informative for target localization.
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