Icelandic Vision Laboratory, Faculty of Psychology, School of Health Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland.
School of Psychology, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2022 Feb;75(2):260-276. doi: 10.1177/1747021820919351. Epub 2020 May 24.
A vast amount of research has been carried out to understand how humans visually search for targets in their environment. However, this research has typically involved search for one unique target among several distractors. Although this line of research has yielded important insights into the basic characteristics of how humans explore their visual environment, this may not be a very realistic model for everyday visual orientation. Recently, researchers have used multi-target displays to assess orienting in the visual field. Eye movements in such tasks are, however, less well understood. Here, we investigated oculomotor dynamics during four visual foraging tasks differing in target crypticity (feature-based foraging vs. conjunction-based foraging) and the effector type being used for target selection (mouse foraging vs. gaze foraging). Our results show that both target crypticity and effector type affect foraging strategies. These changes are reflected in oculomotor dynamics, feature foraging being associated with focal exploration (long fixations and short-amplitude saccades), and conjunction foraging with ambient exploration (short fixations and high-amplitude saccades). These results provide important new information for existing accounts of visual attention and oculomotor control and emphasise the usefulness of foraging tasks for a better understanding of how humans orient in the visual environment.
大量的研究已经进行，以了解人类如何在环境中寻找目标。然而，这项研究通常涉及在几个干扰项中寻找一个独特的目标。虽然这一系列的研究为人类如何探索视觉环境的基本特征提供了重要的见解，但这可能不是一种非常现实的日常视觉定位模型。最近，研究人员使用多目标显示器来评估视野中的定向。然而，在这种任务中，眼球运动的理解还不够充分。在这里，我们研究了在四种不同的视觉觅食任务中眼球运动的动力学，这些任务在目标隐藏性（基于特征的觅食与基于联合的觅食）和用于目标选择的效应器类型（鼠标觅食与凝视觅食）方面存在差异。我们的结果表明，目标隐藏性和效应器类型都影响觅食策略。这些变化反映在眼球运动动力学中，特征觅食与焦点探索（长注视和短振幅扫视）相关，而联合觅食与环境探索（短注视和高振幅扫视）相关。这些结果为现有的视觉注意和眼球运动控制理论提供了重要的新信息，并强调了觅食任务对于更好地理解人类如何在视觉环境中定向的有用性。
