Even if I showed you where you looked, remembering where you just looked is hard

  • People know surprisingly little about their own visual behavior, which can be problematic when learning or executing complex visual tasks such as search of medical images. We investigated whether providing observers with online information about their eye position during search would help them recall their own fixations immediately afterwards. Seventeen observers searched for various objects in “Where's Waldo” images for 3 s. On two-thirds of trials, observers made target present/absent responses. On the other third (critical trials), they were asked to click twelve locations in the scene where they thought they had just fixated. On half of the trials, a gaze-contingent window showed observers their current eye position as a 7.5° diameter “spotlight.” The spotlight “illuminated” everything fixated, while the rest of the display was still visible but dimmer. Performance was quantified as the overlap of circles centered on the actual fixations and centered on the reported fixations. Replicating prior work, this overlap was quite low (26%), far from ceiling (66%) and quite close to chance performance (21%). Performance was only slightly better in the spotlight condition (28%, p = 0.03). Giving observers information about their fixation locations by dimming the periphery improved memory for those fixations modestly, at best.

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Author:Ellen M. Kok, Avi M. Aizenman, Melissa Lê-Hoa VõORCiDGND, Jeremy M. Wolfe
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-444047
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1167/17.12.2
ISSN:1534-7362
Pubmed Id:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28973112
Parent Title (English):Journal of vision
Publisher:ARVO
Place of publication:Rockville, Md.
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2017/10/26
Date of first Publication:2017/10/02
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2017/10/26
Tag:eye movements; fixation memory; gaze-contingent display; introspection
Volume:17
Issue:12, Art. 2
Page Number:11
First Page:1
Last Page:11
Note:
Copyright 2017 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
HeBIS-PPN:45128934X
Institutes:Psychologie und Sportwissenschaften / Psychologie
Dewey Decimal Classification:1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie
6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitung 4.0