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The majority of a football referee's time is spent assessing open-play situations, yet little is known about how referees search for information during this uninterrupted play. The aim of the current study was to examine the exploratory gaze behaviour of elite and sub-elite football referees in open-play game situations. Four elite (i.e. national) and eight sub-elite (i.e. regional) referees officiated an in-situ football match while wearing a mobile eye-tracker to assess their gaze behaviour. Both referential head and eye movements (i.e. moving gaze away from and then back to the ball) were measured. Results showed gaze behaviour was characterised overall by more referential head than eye movements (~75 vs 25%), which were of longer duration (~950 vs 460 ms). Moreover, elite referees employed faster referential movements (~640 vs 730 ms), spending less time with their gaze away from the ball (carrier) than the sub-elite referees. Crucially, both the referential head and eye movements were coordinated relative to key events in the match, in this case passes, showing that referees anticipate the passes to ensure that the referential movements did not occur during passes, rather before or after. The results further our understanding of the coordinative gaze behaviours that underpin expertise in officiating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online job advertisements on various job portals or websites have become the most popular way for people to find potential career opportunities nowadays. However, the majority of these job sites are limited to offering fundamental filters such as job titles, keywords, and compensation ranges. This often poses a challenge for job seekers in efficiently identifying relevant job advertisements that align with their unique skill sets amidst a vast sea of listings. Thus, we propose well-coordinated visualizations to provide job seekers with three levels of details of job information: a skill-job overview visualizes skill sets, employment posts as well as relationships between them with a hierarchical visualization design; a post exploration view leverages an augmented radar-chart glyph to represent job posts and further facilitates users’ swift comprehension of the pertinent skills necessitated by respective positions; a post detail view lists the specifics of selected job posts for profound analysis and comparison. By using a real-world recruitment advertisement dataset collected from 51Job, one of the largest job websites in China, we conducted two case studies and user interviews to evaluate JobViz. The results demonstrated the usefulness and effectiveness of our approach.

Alongside the rapid development of China's tourism sector, the continuous increase in the number of academic articles and research findings related to tourism in China has expanded the related research topics. Using a visual exploration of keywords and Delphi surveys, this paper systematically summarizes the progress in tourism research in China. The findings show that the research topics of national parks, rural revitalization, virtual tourism, the tourism economy and all-for-one tourism were hotspots in Chinese tourism filed over the past decade. Research methodologies have evolved from qualitative concept clarification to combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. In the future, Chinese tourism research should be explored further to the unique theoretical underpinnings of tourism in China; innovative research should be fostered to achieve theoretical originality; and collaborations between academia and the tourism industry should be facilitated to enhance the practical implications of academic findings. The aforementioned research bottlenecks and corresponding measures, and research vision and prospects indicated in the paper can guide future research, and let Western scholars know the hotspots and future trends of tourism research from the Eastern perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Visual exploration is abnormal in schizophrenia; however, few studies have investigated the physiological responses during selecting objectives in more ecological scenarios. This study aimed to demonstrate that people with schizophrenia have difficulties observing the prominent elements of an image due to a deficit mechanism of sensory modulation (active sensing) during natural vision. Methods: An electroencephalogram recording with eye tracking data was collected on 18 healthy individuals and 18 people affected by schizophrenia while looking at natural images. These had a prominent color element and blinking produced by changes in image luminance. Results: We found fewer fixations when all images were scanned, late focus on prominent image areas, decreased amplitude in the eye-fixation-related potential, and decreased intertrial coherence in the SCZ group. Conclusions: The decrease in the visual attention response evoked by the prominence of visual stimuli in patients affected by schizophrenia is generated by a reduction in endogenous attention mechanisms to initiate and maintain visual exploration. Further work is required to explain the relationship of this decrease with clinical indicators.

Visual exploration paradigms involving object arrays have been used to examine salience of social stimuli such as faces in ASD. Recent work suggests performance on these paradigms may associate with clinical features of ASD. We evaluate metrics from a visual exploration paradigm in 4-to-11-year-old children with ASD (n = 23; 18 males) and typical development (TD; n = 23; 13 males). Presented with arrays containing faces and nonsocial stimuli, children with ASD looked less at (p = 0.002) and showed fewer fixations to (p = 0.022) faces than TD children, and spent less time looking at each object on average (p = 0.004). Attention to the screen and faces correlated positively with social and cognitive skills in the ASD group (ps <.05). This work furthers our understanding of objective measures of visual exploration in ASD and its potential for quantifying features of ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on embodied-AI has flourished in recent years to make AI accessible to real-world information. Visual exploration is a very fundamental task in embodied-AI applications such as object-goal navigation, embodied questioning and answering (EQA), and rearrangement. However, it is still a challenging task. The frontier-based method is successful but it is difficult to use for reinforcement learning (RL). Moreover, it heavily relies on two-dimensional grid-map representation, therefore difficult to apply free movement in three-dimensional environments. We propose a novel reward for RGB-D camera-based exploration to maximize the amount of new information contained in the observations obtained from the camera. The basic idea of our method is to predict the destination image by view synthesis using a point cloud obtained by back-projecting depth information. The more lacks in this predicted image, the more likely it is to contain unknown information. For efficient exploration, we also propose topological map implementation to prevent the agent from repetitively visiting the same states. Our method achieves a performance of coverage of area, objects and landmarks comparable to that of state-of-the-art visual exploration methods without using two-dimensional grid maps. Furthermore, we implement object-goal navigation through integration of object detection and simple point-goal navigation, and it outperforms the task-specific RL method with the same architecture on the success rate.

We propose an interactive analytical system for exploring and interpreting non-linear projections. Although non-linear projections are widely used in disclosing complex structures in high-dimensional analysis, there is a strong need to interpret them due to their inherent complexity and weak interpretability. In the machine learning and visualization communities, it is inspiring to use local linear models to fit and interpret non-linear models. Regarding non-linear projections, there are research gaps in both generation and exploration of linear fitting segments. To fill this gap, we propose an optimization algorithm to partition a non-linear projection into linear segments according to the feature of local affine transformations. We then construct a hierarchy of linear segments and conjunct hierarchical visualizations to support a coarse-to-fine exploration. After that, we design and implement a visual interface that integrates the proposed algorithms and a suite of visual tools. Three case studies demonstrate that the proposed approach facilitates the interpretation of non-linear projections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Attenuated social attention is a key marker of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent neuroimaging findings also emphasize an altered processing of sensory salience in ASD. The locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system (LC-NE) has been established as a modulator of this sensory salience processing (SSP). We tested the hypothesis that altered LC-NE functioning contributes to different SSP and results in diverging social attention in ASD. Methods: We analyzed the baseline eye-tracking data of the EU-AIMS Longitudinal European Autism Project (LEAP) for subgroups of autistic participants (n = 166, age = 6–30 years, IQ = 61–138, gender [female/male] = 41/125) or neurotypical development (TD; n = 166, age = 6–30 years, IQ = 63–138, gender [female/male] = 49/117) that were matched for demographic variables and data quality. Participants watched brief movie scenes (k = 85) depicting humans in social situations (human) or without humans (non-human). SSP was estimated by gazes on physical and motion salience and a corresponding pupillary response that indexes phasic activity of the LC-NE. Social attention is estimated by gazes on faces via manual areas of interest definition. SSP is compared between groups and related to social attention by linear mixed models that consider temporal dynamics within scenes. Models are controlled for comorbid psychopathology, gaze behavior, and luminance. Results: We found no group differences in gazes on salience, whereas pupillary responses were associated with altered gazes on physical and motion salience. In ASD compared to TD, we observed pupillary responses that were higher for non-human scenes and lower for human scenes. In ASD, we observed lower gazes on faces across the duration of the scenes. Crucially, this different social attention was influenced by gazes on physical salience and moderated by pupillary responses. Limitations: The naturalistic study design precluded experimental manipulations and stimulus control, while effect sizes were small to moderate. Covariate effects of age and IQ indicate that the findings differ between age and developmental subgroups. Conclusions: Pupillary responses as a proxy of LC-NE phasic activity during visual attention are suggested to modulate sensory salience processing and contribute to attenuated social attention in ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce an ML-driven approach that enables interactive example-based queries for similar behavior in ensembles of spatiotemporal scientific data. This addresses an important use case in the visual exploration of simulation and experimental data, where data is often large, unlabeled and has no meaningful similarity measures available. We exploit the fact that nearby locations often exhibit similar behavior and train a Siamese Neural Network in a self-supervised fashion, learning an expressive latent space for spatiotemporal behavior. This space can be used to find similar behavior with just a few user-provided examples. We evaluate this approach on several ensemble datasets and compare with multiple existing methods, showing both qualitative and quantitative results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The aim was to investigate the effect of aging on the detection, under time constraints, of vulnerable road users. • The detection of vulnerable road users decreased with aging, even in the younger-old group. • Older-old adults compensated for their visual-field decline by doing more visual exploration than the other two groups did. • Further studies should investigate the detection of vulnerable road users, including those on personal mobility devices. The detection of vulnerable road users (VRUs), especially under time constraints, may be impaired in elderly drivers, due to their visual and cognitive decline. This represents a major concern for road safety. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of aging on the detection of VRUs. A further aim was to investigate the impact of external factors on VRU detection. Twenty-two young adults, 20 younger-old adults, and 32 older-old adults were included in the study. A series of photographs were displayed for 500 ms. Participants were asked to detect the VRU, which could be a motorcyclist, a cyclist, or a pedestrian. The VRU was located at one of two distances (near/far), one of two locations (off-centered/centered), and in two car-DRL (daytime running lights) environments (on/off). The ability to correctly detect a VRU was measured. An eye-tracker was used to record eye movements. The main findings showed that VRU-detection performance decreased with aging, even in the younger-old group (ages 55–68). The ability to correctly detect a VRU by older-old adults was poorer particularly when the VRU was a motorcyclist or a cyclist. As a whole, the older-old adults made more fixations to correctly detect the VRU than the other two age groups did. Moreover, the visual angle between the gaze of the participant's last fixation and the target in the older-old group was lower than in the other two groups, particularly when the VRU was off-centered. This finding suggests that older-old adults compensated for their visual-field decline by doing more visual exploration than the other two groups did to correctly detect the VRU. The results are discussed with regards to age-related cognitive and visual deficits. Word count: 279. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a Transformer-based Visual Exploration Network (TVENet) that capably serves as a solution for active perception problems, especially the visual exploration problem: How could a robot that is equipped with a camera explore an unknown 3D environment? The TVENet consists of a Mapper, a Global Policy and a Local Policy. The mapper is trained by supervised learning to take the visual observation as input and generate an occupancy grid map for the explored environment. The Global Policy and the Local Policy are trained by reinforcement learning in order to make navigation decision. Most state-of-the-art methods in visual exploration domain use ResNet as feature extractor, and few of them pay attention to the extraction capability of the extractor. Therefore, this paper focuses on enhancing the extraction capability, and proposes a Transformer-based Feature Pyramid Module (TFPM). Moreover, two tricks for training process are introduced to improve the performance (M.F. and Aux.) Our experiments in photo-realistic simulated environment (Habitat) demonstrate the higher-accuracy mapping of TVENet. Experimental results prove that the TFPM and tricks have positive impacts on the mapping accuracy of the visual exploration and increase it by 5.31% compared with the state-of-the-art. Most importantly, the TVENet is deployed on a real robot (NVIDIA Jetbot) to prove the feasibility of Embodied AI approaches. To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one that proves the viability of the Embodied AI style approach for visual exploration tasks and deploys the pre-trained model on the NVIDIA Jetson robot.

Animals invest in costly vigilance to detect threats. Joining groups reduces these costs, which can be further reduced in mixed-species assemblages. In colour-polymorphic species, morphs often experience different predation pressure and vary in a variety of traits. However, little is known about differences in vigilance or how group composition affects vigilance. The aim was to investigate whether higher conspicuousness increased vigilance and whether vigilance was reduced in mixed-morph groups like in mixed-species assemblages. I tested vigilance in the colour-polymorphic Gouldian Finch (Chloebia gouldiae). Same sex pairs of different age and of either pure (red-red or black-black) or mixed head colour were exposed to three contexts (familiar, changed and novel environment) and head movements were recorded. All birds reduced the frequency of head movements with increasing novelty, indicating different vigilance strategies (switching from a searching to a tracking strategy) depending on the situation. While vigilance did not differ between morphs, morph composition mattered. Black-headed pairs made fewer head movements than mixed-head colour pairs. Results indicated that conspicuousness did not affect vigilance, possibly due to existing adaptations to reduce predation risk. However, whenever red-headed birds were involved, vigilance increased either because of higher group conspicuousness or prevalence of aggression.

Background: Visual exploration is abnormal in schizophrenia; however, few studies have investigated the physiological responses during selecting objectives in more ecological scenarios. This study aimed to demonstrate that people with schizophrenia have difficulties observing the prominent elements of an image due to a deficit mechanism of sensory modulation (active sensing) during natural vision., Methods: An electroencephalogram recording with eye tracking data was collected on 18 healthy individuals and 18 people affected by schizophrenia while looking at natural images. These had a prominent color element and blinking produced by changes in image luminance., Results: We found fewer fixations when all images were scanned, late focus on prominent image areas, decreased amplitude in the eye-fixation-related potential, and decreased intertrial coherence in the SCZ group., Conclusions: The decrease in the visual attention response evoked by the prominence of visual stimuli in patients affected by schizophrenia is generated by a reduction in endogenous attention mechanisms to initiate and maintain visual exploration. Further work is required to explain the relationship of this decrease with clinical indicators., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Underground Research Laboratories (URLs) allow geoscientific in-situ experiments at large scale. At the Mont Terri URL in Switzerland, international research groups conduct numerous experiments in parallel. The measured and simulated data as well as research results obtained from them are highly relevant as they improve the general understanding of geological processes, for example in the context of radioactive waste disposal. Unfortunately, the data obtained at the test site is often only available to researchers who are directly involved in a particular experiment. Furthermore, typical visualisation techniques of such data by domain scientists often lack spatial context and accessing and exploring the data requires prior technical knowledge and a high level of effort. We created a digital replica of the Mont Terri URL and thereby implemented a prototype of a Virtual Experiment Information System that integrates highly heterogeneous data from several different sources. It allows accessing and exploring the relevant data embedded in its spatial context without much prior technical knowledge. Both, simulation results and observation data are displayed within the same system. The 4D visualisation approach focuses on three exemplary experiments conducted at Mont Terri and is easily transferable to other experiments or even other URLs. The Unity Game Engine has been used to develop the prototype. This allowed to build the application for various output devices like desktop computers or Virtual Reality hardware without much additional effort. The implemented system reduces the technical effort required to access and explore highly relevant research data and lowers the cognitive effort usually needed to gain insights from measurements, simulation models and context data. Moreover, it promotes exchange among research groups by enabling interactive visualisations embedded in the URL’s spatial context. In addition, a future use of the system for the communication of scientific methods and results to stakeholders or the general public is plausible.

The role of experience during the exploration of lithic artefacts can be been investigated through multiple approaches. Knowledge can influence visual perception of the environment, whilst action “affordances” can be processed at the first sight of an object. In this study, we used eye tracking to analyse whether and to what extent archaeological knowledge can influence visuospatial attention whilst interacting with stone tools. Archaeologists were found to pay more visual attention to the middle region and the knapped surface. Differences between the visual exploration of choppers and handaxes were also found. Although the general pattern of distribution of the visual attention was similar to naïve subjects, participants with archaeological experience paid more attention to functionally relevant regions. Individuals with archaeological experience directed more attention to the upper region and the knapped surface of the tools, whilst naïve participants spent more time viewing the middle region. We conclude that although both groups could direct their attention to action relevant features in stone tools, functional affordances had a greater effect in subjects with previous experience. Affordances related to manipulation triggered lower attention and showed no differences between participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perceptual-cognitive ability to track multiple moving objects and its contribution to team sports performance has traditionally been studied in the laboratory under non-sports specific conditions. It is thus questionable whether the measured visual tracking performance and the underlying gaze activity reflected the actual ability of team sports players to track teammates and opponents on a real field. Using a Virtual Reality-based visual tracking task, the ability of participants to track multiple moving virtual players as they would do on a soccer field was observed to pursue two objectives. (i) See the influence of different scenario types (soccer-specific trajectories versus pseudo-random trajectories) on the visual tracking performance of soccer (n = 15) compared to non-soccer players (n = 16). (ii) Observe the influence of spatial features of the simulated situations on gaze activity between soccer players and non-soccer players. (i) The linear mixed model regression revealed a significant main effect of the group but no interaction effect between group and the type of trajectories, suggesting that the visual tracking ability of soccer players did not benefit from their specific knowledge when they faced scenarios with real game trajectories. (ii) Virtual players' spatial dispersion and crowding affected the participants' gaze activity and their visual tracking performance. Furthermore, the gaze activity of soccer players differed in some aspects from the gaze activity of non-soccer players. Assumptions are formulated as to the implication of these results in the difference in visual tracking performance between soccer players and non-soccer players. Overall, using soccer-specific trajectories might not be enough to replicate the representativeness of the field conditions in the study of visual tracking performance. Multitasking constraints should be considered along with motor-cognitive dual-tasks in future research to develop the representativeness of visual exploration conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of multi-modal approaches, particularly in conjunction with multivariate analytic techniques, can enrich models of cognition, brain function, and how they change with age. Recently, multivariate approaches have been applied to the study of eye movements in a manner akin to that of neural activity (i.e., pattern similarity). Here, we review the literature regarding multi-modal and/or multivariate approaches, with specific reference to the use of eyetracking to characterize age-related changes in memory. By applying multi-modal and multivariate approaches to the study of aging, research has shown that aging is characterized by moment-to-moment alterations in the amount and pattern of visual exploration, and by extension, alterations in the activity and function of the hippocampus and broader medial temporal lobe (MTL). These methodological advances suggest that age-related declines in the integrity of the memory system has consequences for oculomotor behavior in the moment, in a reciprocal fashion. Age-related changes in hippocampal and MTL structure and function may lead to an increase in, and change in the patterns of, visual exploration in an effort to upregulate the encoding of information. However, such visual exploration patterns may be non-optimal and actually reduce the amount and/or type of incoming information that is bound into a lasting memory representation. This research indicates that age-related cognitive impairments are considerably broader in scope than previously realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perceptual-cognitive ability to track multiple moving objects and its contribution to team sports performance has traditionally been studied in the laboratory under non-sports specific conditions. It is thus questionable whether the measured visual tracking performance and the underlying gaze activity reflected the actual ability of team sports players to track teammates and opponents on a real field. Using a Virtual Reality-based visual tracking task, the ability of participants to track multiple moving virtual players as they would do on a soccer field was observed to pursue two objectives. (i) See the influence of different scenario types (soccer-specific trajectories versus pseudo-random trajectories) on the visual tracking performance of soccer (n = 15) compared to non-soccer players (n = 16). (ii) Observe the influence of spatial features of the simulated situations on gaze activity between soccer players and non-soccer players. (i) The linear mixed model regression revealed a significant main effect of the group but no interaction effect between group and the type of trajectories, suggesting that the visual tracking ability of soccer players did not benefit from their specific knowledge when they faced scenarios with real game trajectories. (ii) Virtual players’ spatial dispersion and crowding affected the participants’ gaze activity and their visual tracking performance. Furthermore, the gaze activity of soccer players differed in some aspects from the gaze activity of non-soccer players. Assumptions are formulated as to the implication of these results in the difference in visual tracking performance between soccer players and non-soccer players. Overall, using soccer-specific trajectories might not be enough to replicate the representativeness of the field conditions in the study of visual tracking performance. Multitasking constraints should be considered along with motor-cognitive dual-tasks in future research to develop the representativeness of visual exploration conditions.

Animals invest in costly vigilance to detect threats. Joining groups reduces these costs, which can be further reduced in mixed-species assemblages. In colour-polymorphic species, morphs often experience different predation pressure and vary in a variety of traits. However, little is known about differences in vigilance or how group composition affects vigilance. The aim was to investigate whether higher conspicuousness increased vigilance and whether vigilance was reduced in mixed-morph groups like in mixed-species assemblages. I tested vigilance in the colourpolymorphic Gouldian Finch (Chloebia gouldiae). Same sex pairs of different age and of either pure (red-red or black-black) or mixed head colour were exposed to three contexts (familiar, changed and novel environment) and head movements were recorded. All birds reduced the frequency of head movements with increasing novelty, indicating different vigilance strategies (switching from a searching to a tracking strategy) depending on the situation. While vigilance did not differ between morphs, morph composition mattered. Black-headed pairs made fewer head movements than mixedhead colour pairs. Results indicated that conspicuousness did not affect vigilance, possibly due to existing adaptations to reduce predation risk. However, whenever red-headed birds were involved, vigilance increased either because of higher group conspicuousness or prevalence of aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans have a remarkable ability to efficiently explore visual scenes and text using eye movements. Humans typically make eye movements (saccades) every ~250 ms. Since saccade initiation and execution take 100 ms, this leaves only ~150 ms to recognize the fixated object (or word) while simultaneously previewing candidates for the next saccade goal. We propose a pipelining mechanism where serial processing occurs within a specific brain region, whereas parallel processing occurs across different brain regions. The mechanism is timed by alpha oscillations that coordinate the saccades, visual recognition, and previewing in the cortical hierarchy. Consequently, the neuronal mechanism supporting natural vision and saccades must be studied in unison to uncover the brain mechanisms supporting visual exploration and reading. Humans have a remarkable ability to efficiently acquire information from natural scenes and text by means of saccadic exploration. Visual exploration is surprisingly efficient given the temporal and spatial constraints imposed by the visual system. As such, both information from current fixations as well as upcoming parafoveal locations must be processed within a 150-ms time window. We propose a novel mechanism in which visual exploration and reading are supported by a pipelining mechanism in which serial processing occurs within a specific brain region, whereas parallel processing occurs across different brain regions. The timing of the pipelining mechanism is organized by alpha oscillations. The pipelining mechanism predicts that fixated and parafoveal objects/words are represented at different phases of an alpha cycle. Consistent with the mechanism, data in humans and non-human primates point to a link between the timing of saccades and alpha oscillations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Driving simulator and eye tracker allow to assess dynamically the characteristics of driver's visual exploration of the driving surrounding. • In driving condition, all the participants show a reduction of the density of the visual field (VF), but only Glaucoma and Elderly ones show a smaller eccentricity of the VF. • Glaucoma participants have a more dynamic gaze than the other participants and they share their gaze more equally between the main ZVIs (Zones of Visual Interest). • Using a classification algorithm, it is possible to identify the group which a participant belongs to on the only basis of the visual exploration characteristics. Assessing the driving skills of people with cognitive or visual impairments is often complex. The analysis of visual exploration strategies can be a good solution to identify the implementation or not of good strategies of information search in the visual scene (adaptation and compensation). In this study, we compared the visual exploration behaviours of 26 healthy, 19 glaucoma and 21 elderly participants. For this purpose, we used a driving simulator for which a visual field measurement test had been adapted to obtain measurements in static and dynamic conditions. The dynamics of the gaze was also measured. Our results showed that each of the three groups of participants had specific characteristics of visual exploration. Using a classification algorithm, we were able to show that it was possible to identify the group which a participant belonged to on the basis of the visual exploration's characteristics. This finding opens the door to many applications in the context of driving assistance and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Exploratory eye movements were assessed in the health elderly. • Cognitive decline was associated with difficulty in visual exploration planning. • Age was tended to be positively associated with the sum of saccade times. • Age and cognitive decline were separately associated with exploratory eye movements. Visual exploration disturbance has been examined in the elderly, mainly from the perspective of associations with cognitive function. However, it remains unknown whether this is a consequence of cognitive decline, age-related changes independent of cognitive decline, or both. In this study, 15 healthy elderly individuals were evaluated using two figure-matching tasks representing visual information processing (clock-matching and inverted clock-matching tasks). Cognitive functions were evaluated for each subject using the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Infrared eye-movement assessments were used to analyze eye movements during task performance. Behavioral analyses showed that age was associated with longer reaction time, while MMSE score was associated with higher accuracy on the inverted clock-matching task. Analyses of eye-movement parameters showed that MMSE score was negatively associated with a parameter indicating difficulty in the efficiency of visual exploration planning, while age was tended to be positively associated with the sum of saccade times in each trial, both predominantly on the inverted clock-matching task. Our approaches highlighted that age and cognitive decline are separately associated with eye-movement characteristics: cognitive decline is associated with difficulty in visual exploration planning, particularly in situations that require substantial visual working memory resources, whereas aging may be associated with oculomotor dysfunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When humans visually explore an image, they typically tend to start exploring its left side. This phenomenon, so-called pseudoneglect, is well known, but its time-course has only sparsely been studied. Furthermore, it is unclear whether age influences pseudoneglect, and the relationship between visuo-spatial attentional asymmetries in a free visual exploration task and a classical line bisection task has not been established. To address these questions, 60 healthy participants, aged between 22 and 86, were assessed by means of a free visual exploration task with a series of naturalistic, colour photographs of everyday scenes, while their gaze was recorded by means of a contact-free eye-tracking system. Furthermore, a classical line bisection task was administered, and information concerning handedness and subjective alertness during the experiment was obtained. The results revealed a time-sensitive window during visual exploration, between 260 and 960 ms, in which age was a significant predictor of the leftward bias in gaze position, i.e., of pseudoneglect. Moreover, pseudoneglect as assessed by the line bisection task correlated with the average gaze position throughout a time-window of 300–1490 ms during the visual exploration task. These results suggest that age influences visual exploration and pseudoneglect in a time-sensitive fashion, and that the degree of pseudoneglect in the line bisection task correlates with the average gaze position during visual exploration in a time-sensitive manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embodied computer vision considers perception for robots in novel, unstructured environments. Of particular importance is the embodied visual exploration problem: how might a robot equipped with a camera scope out a new environment? Despite the progress thus far, many basic questions pertinent to this problem remain unanswered: (i) What does it mean for an agent to explore its environment well? (ii) Which methods work well, and under which assumptions and environmental settings? (iii) Where do current approaches fall short, and where might future work seek to improve? Seeking answers to these questions, we first present a taxonomy for existing visual exploration algorithms and create a standard framework for benchmarking them. We then perform a thorough empirical study of the four state-of-the-art paradigms using the proposed framework with two photorealistic simulated 3D environments, a state-of-the-art exploration architecture, and diverse evaluation metrics. Our experimental results offer insights and suggest new performance metrics and baselines for future work in visual exploration. Code, models and data are publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual exploration of geospatial vector data has become an increasingly important part of the management and analysis of geospatial vector big data (GVBD). With the rapid growth of data scale, it is difficult to realize efficient visual exploration of GVBD by current visualization technologies even if parallel distributed computing technology is adopted. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a visual exploration approach of GVBD on the web map. In this approach, we propose the display-driven computing model and combine the traditional data-driven computing method to design an adaptive real-time visualization algorithm. At the same time, we design a pixel-quad-R tree spatial index structure. Finally, we realize the multilevel real-time interactive visual exploration of GVBD in a single machine by constructing the index offline to support the online computation for visualization, and all the visualization results can be calculated in real-time without the external cache occupation. The experimental results show that the approach outperforms current mainstream visualization methods and obtains the visualization results at any zoom level within 0.5 s, which can be well applied to multilevel real-time interactive visual exploration of the billion-scale GVBD. • A Pixel-Quad-R-tree structure is designed to support the efficient visual exploration of geospatial vector big data (GVBD), the index can adapt to the computational requirements in the subsequent tile drawing process and provide efficient data organization support for GVBD visual exploration. • The PQR-tree-based Adaptive Tile Drawing (PATD) algorithm is proposed, PATD adaptively adopts the optimal pixel generation strategy to determine and achieve efficient visualization performance on a single machine. Meanwhile, the visualization results at each zoom level can be generated in real-time without pre-computation for caching. • An open-source visual exploration tool of GVBD is designed, which can browse data in real-time. Users can either zoom out to inspect the overall distribution or zoom in to view the individual details. Moreover, the tool also supports real-time interactive customization of data styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring large graphs is difficult due to their large size and semantic information such as node attributes. Extracting only a subgraph relevant to the user-specified nodes (called focus nodes) is an effective strategy for exploring a large graph. However, existing approaches following this strategy mainly focus on graph topology and do not fully consider node attributes, resulting in the lack of clear semantics in the extracted subgraphs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called TS-Extractor that can extract a relevant subgraph around the user-selected focus nodes to help the user explore the large graph from a local perspective. By combining the graph topology and the user-selected node attributes, TS-Extractor can extract and visualize a connected subgraph that contains as many nodes sharing the same/similar attribute values with the focus nodes as possible, thereby providing the user with clear semantics. Based on TS-Extractor, we develop a Web-based graph exploration system that allows users to interactively extract, analyze and expand subgraphs. Through two case studies and a user study, we demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of TS-Extractor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient explorative data analysis systems must take into account both what a user knows and wants to know. This paper proposes a principled framework for interactive visual exploration of relations in data, through views most informative given the user's current knowledge and objectives. The user can input pre-existing knowledge of relations in the data and also formulate specific exploration interests, which are then taken into account in the exploration. The idea is to steer the exploration process towards the interests of the user, instead of showing uninteresting or already known relations. The user's knowledge is modelled by a distribution over data sets parametrised by subsets of rows and columns of data, called tile constraints. We provide a computationally efficient implementation of this concept based on constrained randomisation. Furthermore, we describe a novel dimensionality reduction method for finding the views most informative to the user, which at the limit of no background knowledge and with generic objectives reduces to PCA. We show that the method is suitable for interactive use and is robust to noise, outperforms standard projection pursuit visualisation methods, and gives understandable and useful results in analysis of real-world data. We provide an open-source implementation of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Earlier studies on stance and gait with posturographic and EMG-recordings and automatic gait analysis in patients with phobic postural vertigo (PPV) or visual height intolerance (vHI) revealed similar patterns of body stiffening with muscle co-contraction and a slow, cautious gait. Visual exploration in vHI patients was characterized by a freezing of gaze-in-space when standing and reduced horizontal eye and head movements during locomotion. Objective: Based on the findings in vHI patients, the current study was performed with a focus on visual control of locomotion in patients with PPV while walking along a crowded hospital hallway. Methods: Twelve patients with PPV and eleven controls were recruited. Participants wore a mobile infrared video eye-tracking system that continuously measured eye-in-head movements in the horizontal and vertical planes and head orientation and motion in the yaw, pitch, and roll planes. Visual exploration behavior of participants was recorded at the individually preferred speed for a total walking distance of 200 m. Gaze-in-space directions were determined by combining eye-in-head and head-in-space orientation. Walking speeds were calculated based on the trial duration and the total distance traversed. Participants were asked to rate their feelings of discomfort during the walk on a 4-point numeric rating scale. The examiners rated the crowdedness of the hospital hallway on a 4-point numeric rating scale. Results: The major results of visual exploration behavior in patients with PPV in comparison to healthy controls were: eye and head positions were directed more downward in the vertical plane towards the ground ahead with increased frequency of large amplitude vertical orientation movements towards the destination, the end of the ground straight ahead. The self-adjusted speed of locomotion was significantly lower in PPV. Particularly those patients that reported high levels of discomfort exhibited a specific visual exploration of their horizontal surroundings. The durations of fixating targets in the visual surroundings were significantly shorter as compared to controls. Conclusion: Gaze control of locomotion in patients with PPV is characterized by a preferred deviation of gaze more downward and by horizontal explorations for suitable auxiliary means for potential postural support in order to prevent impending falls. These eye movements have shorter durations of fixation as compared to healthy controls and patients with vHI. Finally, the pathological alterations in eye–head coordination during locomotion correlate with a higher level of discomfort and anxiety about falling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks use several user interaction techniques for enabling and soliciting user responses, such as posts, likes and comments. Some of these triggers may lead to posts or comments that a user may regret at a later stage. In this article, we investigate how users may be supported in reflecting upon their past activities, making use of an exploratory spatial hypertext tool. We discuss how we transform raw Facebook data dumps into a graph-based structure and reflect upon design decisions. First results provide insights in users motivations for using such a tool and confirm that the approach helps them in discovering past activities that they perceive as outdated or even embarrassing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Parkinson's disease patients explored less efficiently than age-matched controls. • The patients showed smaller saccade size than the controls on the antisaccade task. • Effects of aging were not observed in the variables showing the disease effects. Parkinson's disease (PD) reportedly show disturbed visual exploration. However, whether this disturbance is due to dysfunctional visual information processing remains unclear. To clarify the effects of PD on visual information processing when exploring for targets and to compare disease effects with aging effects, we used an infrared eye-movement assessment system. Cognitively normal PD patients (n = 13), healthy age-matched (n = 17) and young controls (n = 36) participated in this study, and were evaluated using two figure-matching tasks representing visual information processing (clock-matching and inverted clock-matching tasks) and saccade tasks representing oculomotor function. With figure-matching tasks, PD patients showed significantly larger numbers of images watched in a single trial compared to healthy age-matched controls on the inverted clock-matching task. No aging effects was found in these variables. In contrast, no disease effect was apparent for reaction time, which was significantly longer in healthy age-matched controls than in healthy young controls. For saccade tasks, PD patients showed significantly smaller saccade size than healthy age-matched controls on the antisaccade task, but no aging effects were evident. Our approaches highlighted that visual exploration disturbance in PD may be due to dysfunctional visual information processing in addition to dysfunctional oculomotor processing. These disease effects may differ from aging effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined the validity and reliability of two new soccer tests: the Passing Accuracy Test (PAT), which assesses ball passing accuracy in combination with visual stimulus recognition and the Passing and Visual Recognition test (PVR), which assesses player's space detection skill in a 360 degrees range along with the frequency and the accuracy of ball passing technique. Participants were allocated in four (4) groups based on their age: the Under 11 (U11) group consisted of 101 players, the Under 14 (U14) group consisted of 100 players, the Under 17 (U17) group consisted of 118 players and the Adults (AD) group consisted of 43 players. The typical error, the limits of agreement and the ICC of PAT and PVR test were examined. The results of the study showed high validity and reliability for both tests with the exception in PAT for adult group (ICC = 0.33–0.83; P < 0.05). Therefore, both tests could be valuable tools to assess the accuracy of ball passing technique and the space detection skill in players of different ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In Tanzania, schoolchildren are exposed to a high level of risk as pedestrians. • Understanding behaviour of pedestrian children is key to road safety education. • A low-technology experimental task was used to understand road crossing strategies. • Results show a tendency to apply mixed gaze behaviour patterns. • Implications for effective pedestrian road safety education programs are discussed. Pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, and other vulnerable road users represent more than half of all road fatalities globally. In Tanzania, pedestrians account for a significant proportion of the death toll, accounting for 30% of all traffic fatalities (WHO, 2018) and a 2016 study conducted in Dar Es Salaam found that 87% of school-aged children walk to school (Draisin, 2016), highlighting that school-aged children are exposed to a high level of risk. The present work reports the results of a study conducted in primary and secondary schools in the Arusha Region of Tanzania which investigates the students' road crossing mental representation, as well as their level of hazard perception awareness, through their declared gaze behaviour. The students were asked to identify and tell the areas where hazards could come from within three road crossing scenarios, thus exploring the mental representation of the visual exploration strategies applied by children and teenagers when crossing the road. Results showed the tendency to apply the "compliant gaze behaviour" pattern in a flexible manner and to integrate it with the exploration of other areas in the visual field, particularly by the senior students. Practical implications for planning effective pedestrian road safety training programs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful navigation relies on the flexible and appropriate use of metric representations of space or topological knowledge of the environment. Spatial dimensions (2D vs. 3D), spatial scales (vista-scale vs. large-scale environments) and the abundance of visual landmarks critically affect navigation performance and behavior in healthy human subjects. Virtual reality (VR)-based navigation paradigms in stationary position have given insight into the major navigational strategies, namely egocentric (body-centered) and allocentric (world-centered), and the cerebral control of navigation. However, VR approaches are biased towards optic flow and visual landmark processing. This major limitation can be overcome to some extent by increasingly immersive and realistic VR set-ups (including large-screen projections, eye tracking and use of head-mounted camera systems). However, the highly immersive VR settings are difficult to apply particularly to older subjects and patients with neurological disorders because of cybersickness and difficulties with learning and conducting the tasks. Therefore, a need for the development of novel spatial tasks in real space exists, which allows a synchronous analysis of navigational behavior, strategy, visual explorations and navigation-induced brain activation patterns. This review summarizes recent findings from real space navigation studies in healthy subjects and patients with different cognitive and sensory neurological disorders. Advantages and limitations of real space navigation testing and different VR-based navigation paradigms are discussed in view of potential future applications in clinical neurology.

Selective spatial attention is a crucial cognitive process that guides us to the behaviorally relevant objects in a complex visual world by using exploratory eye movements. The spatial location of objects, their (bottom-up) saliency and (top-down) relevance is assumed to be encoded in one “attentional priority map” in the brain, using different egocentric (eye-, head- and trunk-centered) spatial reference frames. In patients with hemispatial neglect, this map is supposed to be imbalanced, leading to a spatially biased exploration of the visual environment. As a proof of concept, we altered the visual saliency (and thereby attentional priority) of objects in a naturalistic scene along a left-right spatial gradient and investigated whether this can induce a bias in the exploratory eye movements of healthy humans (n = 28; all right-handed; mean age: 23 years, range 19–48). We developed a computerized mask, using high-end “gaze-contingent display (GCD)” technology, that immediately and continuously reduced the saliency of objects on the left—“left” with respect to the head (body-centered) and the current position on the retina (eye-centered). In both experimental conditions, task-free viewing and goal-driven visual search, this modification induced a mild but significant bias in visual exploration similar to hemispatial neglect. Accordingly, global eye movement parameters changed (reduced number and increased duration of fixations) and the spatial distribution of fixations indicated an attentional bias towards the right (rightward shift of first orienting, fixations favoring the scene’s outmost right over left). Our results support the concept of an attentional priority map in the brain as an interface between perception and behavior and as one pathophysiological ground of hemispatial neglect.

Tests that evaluate individual strategies of visual exploration may be useful for uncovering deviations from typical development, such as autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia. One subgroup of visual exploration tests, called cancellation tests, requires the identification of specific targets surrounded by distractors. However, the lack of automated versions of these tests limits their availability to a broader audience. In the present paper, we present an automated version of a cancellation test: the cars’ test. The test is designed to be used by specialists, optimizing both its application and the analysis of collected data. First, we evaluated the cars’ test in a group of six to nine-years-old children enrolled in a private school, 22 children in total. Then, after some modifications based on the observations made during the first test (increase in the number of targets and distractors on the screen, for example), a second test was performed in a public school with a larger group of children, 82 participants, allowing a better statistical analysis of the collected data. The results suggest that the cars’ test is useful in providing information about visual exploration strategies adopted by children and is in agreement with the results of similar tests found in the literature.

In urban cities, multiple intelligent transportation systems generate a large amount of traffic data. Researchers can make well use of these data to provide solutions for solving numerous existing traffic problems, such as traffic congestions and urban transportation resource allocating. Thus, it is meaningful and feasible for traffic researchers to collect these data and analyze the concealed human mobility based on them. In this paper, we propose a visual interactive subway system (VISOS). The system incorporates subway data visualization module, spatial-temporal exploration module, and station clustering module. VISOS utilizes k-means clustering algorithm to explore the subway data interactively, analyze human mobility pattern responsively, and identify functional characteristics of subway stations precisely. In addition, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive spatial-temporal exploration based on the real Shanghai subway data to analyze the importance level of subway stations.

Detecting references and similarities in music lyrics can be a difficult task. Crowdsourced knowledge platforms such as Genius. can help in this process through user-annotated information about the artist and the song but fail to include visualizations to help users find similarities and structures on a higher and more abstract level. We propose a prototype to compute similarities between rap artists based on word embedding of their lyrics crawled from Genius. Furthermore, the artists and their lyrics can be analyzed using an explorative visualization system applying multiple visualization methods to support domain-specific tasks.

Successful navigation relies on the flexible and appropriate use of metric representations of space or topological knowledge of the environment. Spatial dimensions (2D vs. 3D), spatial scales (vista-scale vs. large-scale environments) and the abundance of visual landmarks critically affect navigation performance and behavior in healthy human subjects. Virtual reality (VR)-based navigation paradigms in stationary position have given insight into the major navigational strategies, namely egocentric (body-centered) and allocentric (world-centered), and the cerebral control of navigation. However, VR approaches are biased towards optic flow and visual landmark processing. This major limitation can be overcome to some extent by increasingly immersive and realistic VR set-ups (including large-screen projections, eye tracking and use of head-mounted camera systems). However, the highly immersive VR settings are difficult to apply particularly to older subjects and patients with neurological disorders because of cybersickness and difficulties with learning and conducting the tasks. Therefore, a need for the development of novel spatial tasks in real space exists, which allows a synchronous analysis of navigational behavior, strategy, visual explorations and navigation-induced brain activation patterns. This review summarizes recent findings from real space navigation studies in healthy subjects and patients with different cognitive and sensory neurological disorders. Advantages and limitations of real space navigation testing and different VR-based navigation paradigms are discussed in view of potential future applications in clinical neurology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similarity measuring methods are widely adopted in a broad range of visualization applications. In this work, we address the challenge of representing human perception in the visual analysis of scatterplots by introducing a novel deep-learning-based approach, ScatterNet, captures perception-driven similarities of such plots. The approach exploits deep neural networks to extract semantic features of scatterplot images for similarity calculation. We create a large labeled dataset consisting of similar and dissimilar images of scatterplots to train the deep neural network. We conduct a set of evaluations including performance experiments and a user study to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. The evaluations confirm that the learned features capture the human perception of scatterplot similarity effectively. We describe two scenarios to show how ScatterNet can be applied in visual analysis applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Selective spatial attention is a crucial cognitive process that guides us to the behaviorally relevant objects in a complex visual world by using exploratory eye movements. The spatial location of objects, their (bottom-up) saliency and (top-down) relevance is assumed to be encoded in one "attentional priority map" in the brain, using different egocentric (eye-, head- and trunk-centered) spatial reference frames. In patients with hemispatial neglect, this map is supposed to be imbalanced, leading to a spatially biased exploration of the visual environment. As a proof of concept, we altered the visual saliency (and thereby attentional priority) of objects in a naturalistic scene along a left-right spatial gradient and investigated whether this can induce a bias in the exploratory eye movements of healthy humans (n = 28; all right-handed; mean age: 23 years, range 19–48). We developed a computerized mask, using high-end "gaze-contingent display (GCD)" technology, that immediately and continuously reduced the saliency of objects on the left—"left" with respect to the head (body-centered) and the current position on the retina (eye-centered). In both experimental conditions, task-free viewing and goal-driven visual search, this modification induced a mild but significant bias in visual exploration similar to hemispatial neglect. Accordingly, global eye movement parameters changed (reduced number and increased duration of fixations) and the spatial distribution of fixations indicated an attentional bias towards the right (rightward shift of first orienting, fixations favoring the scene's outmost right over left). Our results support the concept of an attentional priority map in the brain as an interface between perception and behavior and as one pathophysiological ground of hemispatial neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]