Paintings from the mind
1 LIACS, Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 1, Leiden, The Netherlands
bob.cruijsberg@hvu.nl, wiyay@jharap.nl, misterh@zumbi.nl
Introduction
This paper has been written to create a better understanding of the theories which are the basis of the interactive installation “Paintings from the mind”. The goal of the installation is to create an awareness of the fact that everyone has an own worldview based upon personality and culture and uses this Worldview consciously or unconsciously in daily communication. Being aware of these differences in perception could help improve intercultural relationships.
We will now briefly explain the set up. While people look through an open peep hole into the exhibition space, there focus of attention will be measured through an eye-tracking system. The eye-tracking outcome will in real-time generate an image which is an abstract visualisation of the way they look at the world. We expect all different images which would show that everyone has his own perception of the world.
Differences in perception complicate intercultural relationships
In philosophy Weltanschauung (or translated worldview) is a concept dating back to Kant and Goethe, it’s often seen as a wide world perception of a group of people. A Worldview originating from the experiences acquired over several millennia. Not just groups of people or cultures as a whole differ in their perception of the world, but each and every individual does. Individuals are determined by their personalities, which are shaped by their culture(s), the character they have been born with, their family and more.
Fantini (2000) concluded that when people interact across cultures these differences in Worldview can cause more difficult and complicated interactions as their commonalities diminish while differences increase dramatically: That’s why we think it’s important to raise awareness of the fact that everyone creates his or her own reality. And when these realities are further apart in Intercultural contexts people should try to really “understand” each other.
Ortiz (2000) wrote the following about these differences in perceptions: “Our culture defines how we view the world around us because it shapes our values, determines our interactions with the dominant culture, and directs our attention by telling us what is important in the world we inhabit. As a consequence of our culture, we pay more attention to some things than to others.” Dahl (1999) agrees in his work on “Communications and Culture Transformation” with Ortiz on the selection process but describes it in terms of objects perceived actively and clearly, while others are only partially perceived or ignored.” And according to Logan’s “Instance theory of automaticity” (1988), selective attention doesn’t only select what we think is important but also determines part of our behaviour. According to this theory attention forms the retrieval cues that elicit automatic responses from memory.
In our project we want to create an awareness of this selection process, which is based on personality and culture. We hope this way to achieve better understanding of misconceptions during intercultural communication.
We will limit our selves to the Visual selective attention process which accurse when people look without any predefined goals to a scene. Kahneman (1973) classified this as spontaneous looking, next to Task relevant looking and Orientation of Thought looking.
Visual selective attention
The research field of Visual selective attention has focus on two possible answers for shifting your attention: bottom-up stimulus based information generated from the image and top-down memory based knowledge generated from internal visual cognitive systems (Henderson, 2003). Especially the top-down side is interesting in light of this project as the knowledge we acquired is partly derived from the culture we live in. But before we will go into more detail its first necessary to understand the attention process.
Most research on attention agrees on a model like the one below:
(Source: http://www.diku.dk/~panic/eyegaze/article.html)
In this model we distinguish a pre-attentive phase which processes in parallel and an attentive phase which is serial based (Theeuwes, 1993). In short in the pre-attentive phase we process all sensory input and spatially target our zoom lens (Eriksen & Yeh, 1985). We then attend to the smaller selected area which is processed once again bottom up and top-down.
Especially in the pre-attentive phase bottom-up processing plays an important part according to Theeuwes (1993). Bottom-up processing deals with stimuli that draw your attention and hardly involve any memory retrieval. According to the feature integration theory (FIT) (Treisman, 1980) the pre-attentive stage processes information based upon primitive visual features such as color, orientation, brightness, depth, and so forth, parallel across the whole visual field.
In this project the top-down processing is more important to research as this is the part where your previously learnt cultural based knowledge determines the attention process, and so what we think is important or not and activating our automatic responses (Logan, 1988).
Top down knowledge driven attention –unconsciously?
Human attention is not just steered by primitive features that pop-out, but also by knowledge about scenes, objects, goals and plans. Henderson and Ferreira (2004) conclude after a sum up of relevant eye-tracking experiments from 1935 until now that of scene perception it has been known that viewers concentrate their fixations on interesting and informative scene regions.
They also provide a topology of the knowledge available to human attention. This knowledge includes information over the short term and long term. Short-term knowledge allows for the tendency of viewers to refixate previously visited scene areas that are semantically interesting or informative while Long term knowledge involves information about a particular scene acquired and retained over time.
Next to the short term and long term knowledge Henderson and Ferreira also argue that we can make use of schema knowledge. Schema knowledge is assumed to arise from semantic regularities in scenes. For example in the schema of a kitchen we expect a stove and a refrigerator, or spatial relationships like clouds are always in the sky or relationships between object like where there is a fork there is bound to be a knife.
Now the question remains whether some of these cognitive processes happen without the awareness of the viewer. In recent literature on scene recognition, researchers talk about “Gist”, when they talk about the semantic identity of a scene. In the recognition of scenes there has been a lot of evidence that the gist of a scene can be apprehended very rapidly. According to Henderson and Ferreira (2004) gists begins to be available within 30-50 ms of scene onset, which would indicate that the viewer isn’t consciously aware of it. Chun and Jiang (1998) have also shown how memory of visual context can guide unconsciously spatial attention in a scene. Moskowitz (2002) showed that temporary unconscious goals result in unconscious attention shifting to goal relevant items. The participants temporary goals where activated by feelings of incompleteness. Also in light of the “instance theory” Logan writes: “attention to a stimulus is sufficient to cause the retrieval of the information associated with the stimulus, whether or not the subject intends to retrieve it.”
People also attend unconsciously to objects when there is a case of primary needs like hunger or self protection. For example Mogg et al. (1998) showed in a study that Subjects with high levels of hunger showed a greater unconsciously attentional bias for food-related words than those with low hunger. So it’s not just that we use knowledge in our visual selective attention while looking at a scene, but we are often not aware of this process.
Eyetracking to measure attention
An important question relevant to our project is whether eyetracking is reliable enough to measure attention. According to Theeuwes (1993) It has been shown in many experiments that movements of attention can occur without making eye movements. This would indicate that it is not a good instrument to measure attention. However Theeuwes also argues one page further that processing of spatial information outside the line of sight is limited because of anatomical reasons as outside the foveal area people are less sensitive because of a limited number of cones (which are mostly centered around the foveal region), indicating that the eyes most of the times follow attention (to keep processing optimal). Also Wright and Ward (1998) argue that Visual analysis is more efficient if we pay attention to the objects on which our are eyes are fixed. Furthermore they conclude that there must be a close relationship between them as the location of eye-movements and attentional focus correspond most of the time.
With eye-tracking it’s possible to measure the focus of attention (read position) and the fixation time. We will use both in our project to measure the attentional focus based upon bottom up processes and the knowledge previously learnt.
Visual output
Our installation will create abstract images which are indirect related to the attentional focus of the viewers. According to our theory all images will differ from each other as everyone has a different background and uses his own knowledge to guide attention. The generated images will be indirectly derived from the attentional focus through measuring the position and fixations of the eye. So they are not just random pictures but it also has to be clear that it’s not our goal to interpretate these images and link them in any way back to the personality of the viewer. This is why we kept them as abstract as possible. Our final goal is only to show people that everyone get’s a different image. This would suggest that everyone has a different way of focussing their attention.
References
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