Attention and visual memory in visualization and computer graphics

Note

A survey paper discusses the attention and visual memory in computer visualization. It first discusses the effect of preattentive processing, which is quick, pop-out and parallel processing (versus serial processing). The theories of preattentive included:

• Feature Integration Theory: selective perception, classify preattentive features through brand cells. some feature can parallelly detect the features.
• Texton Theory: Elongated blobs (lines, rectangles or ellipse, etc.), Terminator (end of line segments), Crossings of line segments. 
• Similarity Theory: structure units that share a common property, with limited short-term visual memory, a closer structure is with more information to process. 
• Guided Search Theory: the top-down or bottom-up visual search. 
• Boolean Map Theory: consider information location, to process and held the pattern in memory to search the target. 
• Ensemble Coding: guide attention in a large scene, to catch the ensemble difference. 
• Feature Hierarchy: most important data should be highlight by color or other visual features. 

The second section of the paper discussed the visual expectation and memory.

• Eye Tracking: eye gaze pattern analysis, the eye would repeatedly track the visual information if no preattentive information pop out.  
• Postattentive Amnesia: conjunction features which with no preattentive effect, i.e. cannot be semantically recognized and remembered. This can be done by traditional search or postattentive search. 
• Attention guided by memory and prediction: viewer finds a target more rapidly for a subset of the display that is presented repeatedly. Second, the unconscious tendency of a viewer to look for targets in novel locations in the display. 
• Change blindness: the feature that users can not be detected even the user actively search for it, e.g. compare two picture, one with modification. 
• Inattentional blindness: the user can completely fail to perceive visually salient objects or activities, e.g. the gorilla inattentional blindness experiment. 
• Attention Blink: the limited ability in users' ability to process information that arrives in quick succession even when that information is presented at a single location in space. 

The vision models: 

• Visual Attention: perceptual salience (e.g. number of colors, is the visualization perform as expected?), predicting attention (predict where a viewer will focus their attention), directing attention (to catch the eyeball). 
• Visual Memory: to make sure user not miss the important information to avoid the change blindness and inattention blindness effect

Current challenges:

• Visual Acuity: what is the information-processing capacity of the visual system?
• Aesthetics: understand the perception of aesthetics
• Engagement: consider the factor of visual interaction, decision. 

Reference

1. Healey, Christopher, and James Enns. "Attention and visual memory in visualization and computer graphics." IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18.7 (2012): 1170-1188.