Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults
Autor(en): | Acik, Alper Sarwary, Adjmal Schultze-Kraft, Rafael Onat, Selim Koenig, Peter |
Stichwörter: | AGE; age differences; development; eye movements; FIXATION; GAZE ALLOCATION; LIFE-SPAN; LUMINANCE-CONTRAST; natural scenes; overt attention; Psychology; Psychology, Multidisciplinary; SACCADIC EYE-MOVEMENTS; SCENE ANALYSIS; SELECTIVE ATTENTION; STATISTICS; VISUAL-ATTENTION | Erscheinungsdatum: | 2010 | Herausgeber: | FRONTIERS MEDIA SA | Journal: | FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY | Volumen: | 1 | Zusammenfassung: | Despite the growing interest in fixation selection under natural conditions, there is a major gap in the literature concerning its developmental aspects. Early in life, bottom-up processes, such as local image feature - color, luminance contrast etc. - guided viewing, might be prominent but later overshadowed by more top-down processing. Moreover, with decline in visual functioning in old age, bottom-up processing is known to suffer. Here we recorded eye movements of 7- to 9-year-old children, 19- to 27-year-old adults, and older adults above 72 years of age while they viewed natural and complex images before performing a patch-recognition task. Task performance displayed the classical inverted U-shape, with young adults outperforming the other age groups. Fixation discrimination performance of local feature values dropped with age. Whereas children displayed the highest feature values at fixated points, suggesting a bottom-up mechanism, older adult viewing behavior was less feature-dependent, reminiscent of a top-down strategy. Importantly, we observed a double dissociation between children and elderly regarding the effects of active viewing on feature-related viewing: Explorativeness correlated with feature-related viewing negatively in young age, and positively in older adults. The results indicate that, with age, bottom-up fixation selection loses strength and/or the role of top-down processes becomes more important. Older adults who increase their feature-related viewing by being more explorative make use of this low-level information and perform better in the task. The present study thus reveals an important developmental change in natural and task-guided viewing. |
ISSN: | 16641078 | DOI: | 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00207 |
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geprüft am 15.05.2024