Paper title: Adaptive Gaze Control in Natural Environments
Fig. 2a shows that participants attended less to pedestrians in the stopping condition than in the collision
condition. Why is that? (1 point)
The probability of the participants fixating on the pedestrians is lower in the stopping condition because
the elements of risk are taken out of the equation, altering the behaviour of the participants. The figure
shows that this probability is lower for each category of pedestrians which suggests that increases of
fixation are likely due to behavioral relevance rather than salience.
Fig. 2b shows no difference in fixation probability when comparing whether a collision event may occur
or not. Why is that? (1 point)
The fixation probabilities for events where collisions occur is almost identical to events where they don’t
because the likelihood of a participant fixating their gaze is more dependent on the pedestrian's
behavior than the actual event of a collision. The majority of fixations happened before the collision
paths began which highlight that the collision itself isn’t what is necessarily guiding the participants gaze.
The pedestrian either always veering, occasionally veering, or never veering causing the greatest shifts in
fixation likelihood.
The safe pedestrians in the collision condition and stopping condition never stop or collide, but subjects
are still fixated on them less in the stopping condition. What are the two implications of this result? (2
points)
The lower fixation rates towards safe pedestrians in the stopping condition imply that fixations are
caused by changes in risk and behavioral relevance rather than pure visual salience. While the safe
pedestrians never veer towards or collide into the participants, they still pose less of an interference risk
when in the stopping condition, highlighting this result. Additionally, these lower fixation rates imply that
the Rogue pedestrians’ behaviors affect the participants’ fixations on all other pedestrians. This is likely
because the participants distributed less amounts of their attention to all of the pedestrians when the
environment as a whole had lower risk levels.
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When we walk on campus, detecting potential collisions is one of the goals of our attentional system. We
also look around sometimes for interesting events or people. We occasionally spot friends and say hi to
them. Can you make a conjecture on the optimal way to distribute gaze among multiple attention tasks?
(2 points)
One way we can best distribute gaze between multiple attention tasks is to shift our gaze when there are
minimal or fewer things happening in our peripheral vision. For example, if someone is walking to class
on a crowded road, it is harder and more dangerous for them to shift their attention to a group of
students promoting a club. However, if there is less in the person’s way, they can easily distribute their
attention to things and people on their way. While unpredictable situations can still occur, if there is less
happening in our direct line of sight, we can more comfortably divide our visual attention towards
multiple tasks.
The paper demonstrates that people handle the uncertainty of the natural world by proactively
allocating their gaze based on prior experience. List two other everyday activities in which we naturally
generate proactive gaze. (2 points)
One everyday activity where we generate proactive gaze based on our experiences would be driving and
checking for incoming cars. Similar to the study, there are pedestrians that drivers need to take into
account when on the road, causing us to naturally check our mirrors before making a turn or crossing an
intersection. We do the same thing for other cars when we both way before driving or check our mirrors
before changing lanes. Another everyday activity that causes a natural, proactive gaze would be typing or
writing notes from a presentation. Instead of pausing between each letter of a sentence, we naturally
look at 2-4 words at a time and write them down as our prior experiences push us to plan what needs to
be written ahead so we can get the notes in quicker.