08:30 - 10:00
Tue-B16-Talk IV-
Tue-Talk IV-
Room: B16
Chair/s:
Jan Tünnermann, Adriana L Ruiz-Rizzo, Ingrid Scharlau
Bundesen’s Theory of Visual Attention (TVA) has been around for approximately half a century. Its basic idea is that visual perception is biased competition of visual categorizations that race visual short-term memory. The biases stem from attentional and perceptual influences. TVA links observable data to theoretical concepts with mathematical rigor and helps to explain phenomena with quantitatively precise concepts. Progress in TVA might not be fast, but it is continuous and robust. This symposium covers recent developments in topics of basic and applied research. In the first session, Scharlau & Tünnermann survey recent advances with new stimuli and recording
settings. Connecting to this, Biermeier & Scharlau investigate attention capacity in mixed-reality settings. Poth & Schneider disentangle the speed of location and object processing. Tünnermann et al. show how simulations of visual foraging depend on dynamically adjusting spatial attention, and Blurton et al. discuss improvements in modeling cognitive control. The second session focuses on recent applications of TVA in clinical contexts: Ruiz-Rizzo et al. present the relationship between visual processing speed and cognitive complaints in older adults. Kattlun et al. investigate the role of visual-short-term memory in cognitive deficits of patients who survived severe sepsis. Martin et
al. demonstrate how fatigue relates to visual processing speed and pupillary unrest in post-COVID patients. Srowig et al. close by showing how visual short-term memory is associated with neuropsychological performance in patients at a high-risk for dementia.
Back
Integrating spatial attention dynamics in visual foraging with TVA
Tue-B16-Talk IV-04
Presented by: Jan Tünnermann
Jan Tünnermann 1, Árni Kristjánsson 2, Anna Schubö 1
1 University of Marburg, 2 University of Iceland
Visual foraging tasks, where observers collect different item types from “patches”, are a versatile tool for studying selective attention in more naturalistic scenarios than other typical attention tasks can provide. TVA has mainly been applied to rather rigid experimental tasks, such as letter-based whole and partial report tasks. In ongoing work aimed at merging TVA’s formal modeling with the flexibility of foraging tasks, we have implemented simulations of foraging with TVA-inspired attentional control mechanisms, replicating the characteristic “run behavior” seen in foraging with repeated selections of same-type elements. However, these simulations have also demonstrated the need to dynamically adjust the focus of spatial attention: During “cruise phases” of foraging, where foragers quickly select items of a single type, a small spatial focus (often called functional viewing field) seems beneficial, favoring nearby items and thereby minimizing the overall distance foragers have to move across the patches. But between such phases, no targets may be nearby, so the functional viewing field should be expanded to enable the selection of more peripheral targets. Here we systematically investigate adjustments of the functional viewing field by comparing different simulations to empirical data. We discuss the reciprocal implications for attention control during foraging and for the application of TVA to naturalistic scenarios.
Keywords: TVA, visual attention, visual search, visual foraging
Back