Searching and fixating: scale-invariance vs. characteristic timescales in attentional processes

Abstract

In an experiment involving semantic search, the visual movements of sample populations subjected to visual and aural input were tracked in a taskless paradigm. The probability distributions of saccades and fixations were obtained and analyzed. Scale-invariance was observed in the saccadic distributions, while the fixation distributions revealed the presence of a characteristic (attentional) time scale for literate subjects. A detailed analysis of our results suggests that saccadic eye motions are an example of Levy, rather than Brownian, dynamics.

Accepted to Europhysics Letters (2011)

References in corpus (3)

• Scaling detection in time series: diffusion entropy analysis
• Lévy scaling: the Diffusion Entropy Analysis applied to DNA sequences
• Scaling of Horizontal and Vertical Fixational Eye Movements

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Statistical patterns of visual search for hidden objects