Symposium (S7): Are Eye Movements Optimal?Thursday 29 August 2013, 09:00-11:00, Hanse | |
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| Organizer: P Verghese Much recent work has concerned itself with the question of whether or not saccade planning is optimal. Results have been mixed. This symposium reflects on that work and asks the important question: What tasks have human eye movements evolved for? In what tasks is it important for saccades to be optimal? Is saccade optimality a question we should be concerned with? How have these movements evolved to serve the sensing needs of the organism? This symposium reviews the efficiency of saccadic eye movements in the context of different laboratory tasks and opens the discussion into how we should approach thinking about and studying the saccadic system for the purposes for understanding their role in vision, perception and action in the real world. Current research investigating the efficiency of eye movements provides mixed results, depending on the task. Some studies indicate that saccadic targeting is efficient. For instance, eye movements executed during search for a single target appear efficient and appear to incorporate knowledge about where the target is most likely to occur. On the other hand, saccades are not always directed to maximize expected gain in a reward/penalty paradigm, nor do they seem to fully incorporate the decrease in visibility with target eccentricity. Furthermore, they are grossly suboptimal in tasks requiring a sequence of saccades to gather information about multiple targets. Thus, while saccade planning appears flexible in some task conditions, it may not reflect the most efficient information gathering strategy. The aim of the symposium is to discuss factors that govern saccade targeting by considering the relative contribution of prior visual experience, potential cost/benefit, time pressure and task demands. | |
| 09:00 | Timing of saccadic eye movements during demanding visual tasks E Kowler, C Aitkin, J Wilder, C-C Wu |
| 09:20 | Human eye movements are optimal for face recognition M Peterson, M P Eckstein |
| 09:40 | Optimal and non-optimal fixation selection in visual search W S Geisler, J Najemnik |
| 10:00 | Sub-optimal eye movement strategies in simple visual and visuo-motor tasks L T Maloney, H Zhang, C Morvan, L-A Etezad-Heydari |
| 10:20 | Dynamic integration of salience and value information for saccadic eye movements A Schütz |
| 10:40 | Saccadic efficiency in visual search for multiple targets P Verghese |
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