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This chapter is concerned with eye movements while viewing natural scenes and engaging in visual activities. It starts with a discussion of early descriptive studies of picture scanning. The concept of a scanpath is then introduced, followed by a discussion of scene perception, more specifically the role of objects in scenes. This section includes a brief account of theories of object perception and scene perception together with the role eye movements in scene understanding. The theory of deictic vision and the role of eye movements in everyday activities including driving, sport, and tea making, are discussed.

When trying to predict where the eyes will go next in the free exploration of real-world scenes, recent models have focused on the analysis of visual stimulus properties in order to compute the priority that will be assigned to a given scene component or object. Possible influences on gaze control that are rooted in the meaning of the scene and the semantic relation of the scene to the objects in it, have been regarded as elusive and mostly relevant to later stages of scene exploration. This chapter reviews recent theoretical developments that provide a more acceptable framework for considering influences of object-in-scene semantics on gaze control. In addition, it presents eye-tracking data recorded in intentional search and exogenous cueing paradigms, which demonstrate reliable and immediate context effects on eye guidance in meaningful scenes.

People readily recognize the faces of friends and the objects around them. They do so effortlessly, but these cannot just be part of a simple task for the visual system. Faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns. People see objects from different viewpoints and in different arrangements. How does the visual system solve these problems? This book attempts to answer this question by considering how analytic and holistic processes contribute to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes. This volume brings together 21st-century views. The contributors to this volume ask whether analytic and holistic processes contribute differently to the perception of faces and objects. They also consider whether different mechanisms code holistic and analytic information or whether a single universal system can suffice.

This chapter describes the neural systems involved in the perception and recognition of scenes, particularly the PPA, a region in the brain that plays an important role in scene processing. Besides encoding the spatial layout of scenes, the PPA also encodes visual properties of scenes and spatial information that can be taken from both scenes and objects. Recent neuroimaging studies explore the possibility that the PPA may be composed of two functionally or anatomically distinct parts. Complementing this work are studies indicating that there might be a second pathway for scene recognition that passes through the lateral occipital cortex. While PPA represents scenes based on whole-scene characteristics, LO represents scenes based on the identities of within-scene objects.

This chapter comments on Anne Treisman's 2006 paper How the deployment of attention determines what we see, published in Visual Cognition. Treisman reviews the evidence from some research on focused attention and its use in binding features, as well as distributed attention and how it differs from focused attention in terms of scale and function. The chapter compares Treisman's distributed attention with similar concepts such as global or holistic attention and examines how two modes of attention can be empirically dissociated. It summarizes the results of some recent studies that looked into statistical properties, rapid scene categorization, and gist perception, and suggests how Treisman's idea of distributed attention may play a role. It considers how the visual system extracts the mean size of an array and how properties acquired from distributed attention contribute to rapid scene perception.