Temporal relation between bottom-up versus top-down strategies for gaze prediction

Much research has been focused on the study of bottom-up, feature-based visual perception, as a means to generate salience maps, and predict the distribution of fixations within images. However, it is plausible that the eventual perception of distinct objects within a 3D scene (and the subsequent top-down effects) would also have a significant effect on the distributions of fixations within that scene. This research is aimed at testing a hypothesis that there exists a switching from feature-based to object-based scanning of images, as the viewer gains a higher-level understanding of the image content, and that this switching can be detected by changes in the pattern of eye fixations within the image. An eye tracker is used to monitor the fixations of human participants over time, as they view images, in an effort to answer questions pertaining to (1) the nature of fixations during bottom-up and top-down scene scan scenarios (2) the ability of assessing whether the subject is perceiving the scene content based on low-level visual features or distinct objects, and (3) identification of the participant’s transition from a bottom-up feature-based perception to a top-down object-based perception.