Gaze control and memory for objects while walking in a real world environment

Abstract

Assessments of gaze behaviour and object memory are typically done in the context of experimental paradigms briefly presenting transient static images of synthetic or real scenes. Less is known about observers’ gaze behaviour and memory for objects in a real world environment. While wearing a mobile eyetracker, 20 subjects performed a task in which they walked around a building eight times and were either told to walk normally, or to also expect to be asked about what they saw following their walk. During the course of their walk, nine objects along their path were exchanged for similar token objects of the same category (e.g., whisk broom for push broom). Observers told to prepare for a memory test were much more likely to notice object changes than observers simply told to walk normally (32% vs. 5%). Detected object changes were also fixated for longer duration prior to the change, suggesting a role of task demand in gaze control and the selective storage of visual information.

Keywords:

• Change detection
• Eye movements
• Walking
• Object memory
• Real world

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health/Public Health Service Research Grants R01 EY015925 and by IC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program Grant 8-444069-23149 (icpostdoc.org). We thank Carter Phelps, Jessica Gaska, Nick Bernstein, Paul Hacker, and Sanjay Athalye for help running subjects and analysis of eyetracking video.

Notes

¹A different number of subjects were included in each condition because of the variable number of subjects for whom eyetracking data was sufficiently robust to permit analysis. Subjects continued to be run until five subjects in each condition had a sufficient eye track.

²An area receiving recent interest is the misperceptions during magic tricks, where stage manipulations of objects may arguably be related to laboratory manipulations of images in change detection experiments (Kuhn, Amlani, & Rensink, 2008; Kuhn & Tatler, 2005; Kuhn, Tatler, Findlay, & Cole, 2008)