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Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements

People use eye movements extremely effectively to find objects of interest in a cluttered visual scene. Distracting, task-irrelevant attention capturing regions in the visual field should be avoided as they jeopardize the efficiency of search. In the current study, we used eye tracking to determine...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Kilpeläinen, Markku, Theeuwes, Jan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5145222/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27930724
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0167956
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author Kilpeläinen, Markku
Theeuwes, Jan
author_facet Kilpeläinen, Markku
Theeuwes, Jan
author_sort Kilpeläinen, Markku
collection PubMed
description People use eye movements extremely effectively to find objects of interest in a cluttered visual scene. Distracting, task-irrelevant attention capturing regions in the visual field should be avoided as they jeopardize the efficiency of search. In the current study, we used eye tracking to determine whether people are able to avoid making saccades to a predetermined visual area associated with a financial penalty, while making fast and accurate saccades towards stimuli placed near the penalty area. We found that in comparison to the same task without a penalty area, the introduction of a penalty area immediately affected eye movement behaviour: the proportion of saccades to the penalty area was immediately reduced. Also, saccadic latencies increased, but quite modestly, and mainly for saccades towards stimuli near the penalty area. We conclude that eye movement behaviour is under efficient cognitive control and thus quite flexible: it can immediately be adapted to changing environmental conditions to improve reward outcome.
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spelling pubmed-51452222016-12-22 Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements Kilpeläinen, Markku Theeuwes, Jan PLoS One Research Article People use eye movements extremely effectively to find objects of interest in a cluttered visual scene. Distracting, task-irrelevant attention capturing regions in the visual field should be avoided as they jeopardize the efficiency of search. In the current study, we used eye tracking to determine whether people are able to avoid making saccades to a predetermined visual area associated with a financial penalty, while making fast and accurate saccades towards stimuli placed near the penalty area. We found that in comparison to the same task without a penalty area, the introduction of a penalty area immediately affected eye movement behaviour: the proportion of saccades to the penalty area was immediately reduced. Also, saccadic latencies increased, but quite modestly, and mainly for saccades towards stimuli near the penalty area. We conclude that eye movement behaviour is under efficient cognitive control and thus quite flexible: it can immediately be adapted to changing environmental conditions to improve reward outcome. Public Library of Science 2016-12-08 /pmc/articles/PMC5145222/ /pubmed/27930724 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0167956 Text en © 2016 Kilpeläinen, Theeuwes http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Kilpeläinen, Markku
Theeuwes, Jan
Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements
title Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements
title_full Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements
title_fullStr Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements
title_full_unstemmed Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements
title_short Efficient Avoidance of the Penalty Zone in Human Eye Movements
title_sort efficient avoidance of the penalty zone in human eye movements
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5145222/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27930724
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0167956
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