GaCIT in Tampere, day 4.

A follow up the hands-on session was held by Andrew Duchowski. This time to investigate eye movements on moving stimulo (ie. video clips) A classic experiment from the Cognitive Science domain was used as stimuli (the umbrella woman) It serves as a very nice example on how to use eye trackers in a practical experiment.

The task objective is to either count the passes of the white or black team. The experiment illustrates the inattentional blindness which causes certain objects in the movie to go unnoticed.
More information on the phenomenon can be found in the following papers:

• Becklen, Robert and Cervone, Daniel (1983) Selective looking and the noticing of unexpected events. Memory and Cognition, 11, 601-608.

• Simons, Daniel J. and Chabris, Christopher F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, Perception, 28, pp.1059-1074.

• Rensink, Ronald A. (2000). When Good Observers Go Bad: Change Blindness, Inattentional Blindness, and Visual Experience, Psyche, 6(09), August 2000. Commentary on: A. Mack and I. Rock (1998) Inattentional Blindness. MIT Press.

Defining areas of interest (AOI) often creates the tedious process of keyframing where the object has to be defined in each frame of the video. Automatic matchmoving/rotoscoping software does exists but it often does not perform a perfect segmentation of the moving objects. Dixon et al. have performed research in this area, more information can be found in the following papers:

• Dixon, T.D., Nikolov, S.G. et al. (2006). Scanpath analysis of fused multi-sensor images with luminance change: A pilot study. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Fusion, Florence, Italy, July 2006.
  
  
• Dixon, T.D, G Nikolov, J Lewis, J. Li, E Fernández, J M Noyes, T Troscianko, D R Bull, C N Canagarajah. Multi-Sensor Fused Video Assessment using Scanpath Analysis. Biologically Inspired Information Fusion (BIIF 2006) WorkshopUniversity of Surrey, UK, 22nd–23rd August 2006.
  

The afternoon was used to participant presentations which covered a rather wide range of topics, visual cognition, expert vs novices gaze patterns, gaze interaction, HCI and usability research.