Dr. Mary Hayhoe - Gaze Control in Natural Behavior
Date: Wednesday, Jan 15th, 2020
Time: 10:00am
Location: HUB Presentation Studio (ASB10900)
Host: Dr. Daniel Marigold
Affiliation: Professor, University of Texas Austin
Title: Gaze Control in Natural Behavior
Abstract: Investigation of natural behavior has contributed a number of insights to our understanding of visual guidance of actions by highlighting the importance of behavioral goals and focusing attention on how vision and action play out in time. In this context, humans make continuous sequences of sensory-motor decisions to satisfy current behavioral goals, and the role of vision is to provide the relevant information for making good decisions in order to achieve those goals. Components of a good decision include the task, which defines the behavioral goals, the rewards and costs associated with those goals, uncertainty about the state of the world, and prior knowledge. I will give examples of these factors in the context of both real and virtual environments, focusing on situations involving sequences of actions chosen by the subject, in contrast to the traditional trial structure controlled by the experimenter. This allows examination of the factors that influence the transitions from one action to the next, something which is harder to get at in more controlled paradigms. Natural behavior also allows us to ask just what information is available to vision, and what computations or tasks need to be performed within a given context, questions that are hard to answer without looking at natural behavior.
