Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults
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 more prominent but lat...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2010-11-01
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| Series: | Frontiers in Psychology |
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| Online Access: | http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00207/full |
| _version_ | 1811257468568731648 |
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| author | Alper eAçık Adjmal eSarwary Rafael eSchultze-Kraft Selim eOnat Peter eKönig |
| author_facet | Alper eAçık Adjmal eSarwary Rafael eSchultze-Kraft Selim eOnat Peter eKönig |
| author_sort | Alper eAçık |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | 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 more prominent but later overshadowed by more top-down processing. Moreover, with decline in visual functioning in old age, the bottom-up processing is known to suffer. Here we recorded the eye-movements of 7-9 year-old children, 19-27 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 display the highest feature values at fixated points, suggesting a bottom-up mechanism, older adult viewing behavior is 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 correlates with feature-related viewing negatively in young age, and positively in the case of 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-12T17:57:48Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-ceb48459490e465ba9063a3c8e400277 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1664-1078 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-12T17:57:48Z |
| publishDate | 2010-11-01 |
| publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Frontiers in Psychology |
| spelling | doaj.art-ceb48459490e465ba9063a3c8e4002772022-12-22T03:22:17ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Psychology1664-10782010-11-01110.3389/fpsyg.2010.002077198Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adultsAlper eAçık0Adjmal eSarwary1Rafael eSchultze-Kraft2Selim eOnat3Peter eKönig4University of OsnabrückUniversity of OsnabrückUniversity of OsnabrückUniversity of OsnabrückUniversity of OsnabrückDespite 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 more prominent but later overshadowed by more top-down processing. Moreover, with decline in visual functioning in old age, the bottom-up processing is known to suffer. Here we recorded the eye-movements of 7-9 year-old children, 19-27 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 display the highest feature values at fixated points, suggesting a bottom-up mechanism, older adult viewing behavior is 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 correlates with feature-related viewing negatively in young age, and positively in the case of 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.http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00207/fulldevelopmentnatural scenesovert attentionage differencesEye-movements |
| spellingShingle | Alper eAçık Adjmal eSarwary Rafael eSchultze-Kraft Selim eOnat Peter eKönig Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults Frontiers in Psychology development natural scenes overt attention age differences Eye-movements |
| title | Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults |
| title_full | Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults |
| title_fullStr | Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults |
| title_full_unstemmed | Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults |
| title_short | Developmental changes in natural viewing behavior: bottom-up and top-down differences between children, young adults and older adults |
| title_sort | developmental changes in natural viewing behavior bottom up and top down differences between children young adults and older adults |
| topic | development natural scenes overt attention age differences Eye-movements |
| url | http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00207/full |
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