Date of Award
Summer 7-2024
Document Type
Thesis (Ph.D.)
Department or Program
Psychological & Brain Sciences
First Advisor
Caroline E. Robertson
Abstract
When exploring a real-world scene, individuals direct their gaze to selectively attend, leaving a trace of their informational priorities. What drives this information selection, and what causes individuals to prioritize information differently from one another? In this dissertation, I aim to understand the influences that guide visual attention as individuals explore real-world environments and to characterize patterns of visual attention that differ among individuals and among groups with neurodevelopmental conditions. In Chapter 1, I introduce a novel eyetracking paradigm, in which participants can actively explore immersive, naturalistic scene photospheres via headmounted virtual reality. Using this paradigm, I demonstrate that naturalistic visual attention is information seeking: when compared to passively seated viewers, active viewers are disproportionately guided by meaningful semantic information. In Chapter 2, I extend this finding by demonstrating that visual attention is a proactive information seeking process guided by individually specific conceptual priorities beyond the visual domain. To show this, I present a new approach for characterizing abstract, conceptual-level information in real-world scenes that draws on recent advancements in natural language modeling. First, in a large cohort of neurotypical adults, I observe “gaze fingerprints”: reliable, individuating patterns of visual attention that generalize across diverse visual stimuli. I then show that conceptual priorities also guide visual attention patterns among autistic adults, and that conceptual gaze models contain classifiable information about a viewer’s diagnostic status. Finally, in Chapter 3, I focus on a specific domain of conceptual information, social information, and investigate how social attention is impacted by the perceptual load of real-world environments among autistic and non-autistic adults. I find that group-level differences are magnified in conditions with higher perceptual load, suggesting that social attention differences are not a static signature of the autistic group. Taken together, the studies I present in my dissertation demonstrate that by studying visual attention under experimental conditions that more closely approximate the conditions of real-world viewing, gaze behavior can offer rich insights, revealing complex signatures of individual minds.
Recommended Citation
Haskins, Amanda J., "Gaze in Context: Individual and Group Differences in Real-World Visual Attention" (2024). Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations. 294.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/dissertations/294
