Dimensionally Specific Capture of Attention: Implications for Saliency Computation

The Role of Perspective Taking on Attention: A Review of the Special Issue on the Reflexive Attentional Shift Phenomenon

Attention is a process that alters how cognitive resources are allocated, and it allows individuals to efficiently process information at the attended location. The presence of visual or auditory cues in the environment can direct the focus of attention toward certain stimuli even if the cued stimuli are not the individual’s primary target. Samson et al. demonstrated that seeing another person in the scene (i.e., a person-like cue) caused a delay in responding to target stimuli not visible to that person: “alter-centric intrusion.” This phenomenon, they argue, is dependent upon the fact that the cue used resembled a person as opposed to a more generic directional indicator. The characteristics of the cue are the core of the debate of this special issue. Some maintain that the perceptual-directional characteristics of the cue are sufficient to generate the bias while others argue that the cuing is stronger when the cue has social characteristics (relates to what another individual can perceive). The research contained in this issue confirms that human attention is biased by the presence of a directional cue. We discuss and compare the different studies. The pattern that emerges seems to suggest that the social relevance of the cue is necessary in some contexts but not in others, depending on the cognitive demand of the experimental task. One possibility is that the social mechanisms are involved in perspective taking when the task is cognitively demanding, while they may not play a role in automatic attention allocation.

Supervisors' Visual Attention Allocation Modeling Using Hybrid Entropy

With the improvement in automation technology, humans have now become supervisors of the complicated control systems that monitor the informative human–machine interface. Analyzing the visual attention allocation behaviors of supervisors is essential for the design and evaluation of the interface. Supervisors tend to pay attention to visual sections with information with more fuzziness, which makes themselves have a higher mental entropy. Supervisors tend to focus on the important information in the interface. In this paper, the fuzziness tendency is described by the probability of correct evaluation of the visual sections using hybrid entropy. The importance tendency is defined by the proposed value priority function. The function is based on the definition of the amount of information using the membership degrees of the importance. By combining these two cognitive tendencies, the informative top-down visual attention allocation mechanism was revealed, and the supervisors’ visual attention allocation model was built. The Building Automatic System (BAS) was used to monitor the environmental equipment in a subway, which is a typical informative human–machine interface. An experiment using the BAS simulator was conducted to verify the model. The results showed that the supervisor’s attention behavior was in good agreement with the proposed model. The effectiveness and comparison with the current models were also discussed. The proposed attention allocation model is effective and reasonable, which is promising for use in behavior analysis, cognitive optimization, and industrial design.