Attention-based visual routines: sprites.
A central role of visual attention is to generate object descriptions that are not available from early vision. Simple examples are counting elements in a display or deciding whether a dot is inside or outside a closed contour (Ullman, Cognition 18 (1984) 97). We are interested in the high-level descriptions of dynamic patterns - the motions that characterize familiar objects undergoing stereotypical action - such as a pencil bouncing on a table top, a butterfly in flight, or a closing door. We examine whether the perception of these action patterns is mediated by attention as a high-level animation or 'sprite'. We have studied the discrimination of displays made up of simple, rigidly linked sets of points in motion: either pairs of points in orbiting motion or 11 points in biological motion mimicking human walking. We find that discrimination of even the simplest dynamic patterns demands attention.
Cavanagh
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Vision Sciences Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. patrick@wjh.harvard.edu
Labianca
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Thornton
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D001288:Attention; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D009039:Motion Perception; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology