CMU talk: Looking without Seeing is in fact Seeing without Knowing -- Insights from Gaze-tracked Change Blindness Studies

Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition Seminar:

Looking without Seeing is in fact Seeing without Knowing
-- Insights from Gaze-tracked Change Blindness Studies

Stella X. Yu
Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor
Computer Science @ Boston College
http://www.cs.bc.edu/~syu

Tuesday, April 28

Abstract: Change blindness experiments demonstrate that human vision often neglects certain aspects of the visual scene while attending to others. Using a gaze-tracked flicker paradigm and synthetic images equally rendered in three fundamental features, we explore whether and how innate feature processing might be responsible for the blindness to a change. Our analysis of detection accuracy, detection time, and gaze patterns in this active visual search task reveals distinctive feature extraction, discrimination, and selectivity of size, color, and orientation that underly different behaviours of change blindness. With an array of two-feature stimuli where a single element could change in either feature dimension, we discover that what is changing is sensed long before the subject consciously detects the change, and the change detection task is not accomplished in a single thread of searching for a nonspecific change, but in three separate threads: sensing what the change is, localizing where it might be, and discerning how it is actualized.


Bio: Stella X. Yu got her Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied robotics at the Robotics Institute and vision science at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. She then went to the University of California, Berkeley to continue her research on computer vision. Her research interests are visual perception and computer vision. Since she joined Boston College, Dr. Yu has been developing an interdisciplinary curriculum and research agenda around art and vision. Her 5-year NSF CAREER proposal, entitled Art and Vision: Scene Layout from Pictorial Cues, was awarded in 2007. Her recent works include image segmentation, object matching, spatial layout categorization and inference, change blindness, and brightness perception.