%0 Journal Article %J Journal of Vision %D 2019 %T Eye movements and retinotopic tuning in developmental prosopagnosia %A M.F. Peterson %A Ian Zaun %A Hoke, Harris %A Jiahui, Guo %A Duchaine, Brad %A Nancy Kanwisher %B Journal of Vision %V 19 %P 7 %8 Jan-08-2019 %G eng %U https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31426085 %N 9 %! Journal of Vision %R 10.1167/19.9.7 %0 Journal Article %J Scientific Reports %D 2018 %T Minimal memory for details in real life events %A Pranav Misra %A Marconi, Alyssa %A M.F. Peterson %A Gabriel Kreiman %X
The extent to which the details of past experiences are retained or forgotten remains controversial. Some studies suggest massive storage while others describe memories as fallible summary recreations of original events. The discrepancy can be ascribed to the content of memories and how memories are evaluated. Many studies have focused on recalling lists of words/pictures, which lack the critical ingredients of real world memories. Here we quantified the ability to remember details about one hour of real life. We recorded video and eye movements while subjects walked along specified routes and evaluated whether they could distinguish video clips from their own experience from foils. Subjects were minimally above chance in remembering the minutiae of their experiences. Recognition of specific events could be partly explained by a machine-learning model of video contents. These results quantify recognition memory for events in real life and show that the details of everyday experience are largely not retained in memory.
%B Scientific Reports %V 8 %8 Jan-12-2018 %G eng %U https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-33792-2 %N 1 %! Sci Rep %R 10.1038/s41598-018-33792-2 %0 Journal Article %J Psychological Science %D 2017 %T Eye-Tracking Causality %A Tobias Gerstenberg %A M.F. Peterson %A Noah D. Goodman %A D. A. Lagnado %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %K causality %K counterfactuals %K eye tracking %K intuitive physics %K mental simulation %K open data %K open materials %XHow do people make causal judgments? What role, if any, does counterfactual simulation play? Counterfactual theories of causal judgments predict that people compare what actually happened with what would have happened if the candidate cause had been absent. Process theories predict that people focus only on what actually happened, to assess the mechanism linking candidate cause and outcome. We tracked participants’ eye movements while they judged whether one billiard ball caused another one to go through a gate or prevented it from going through. Both participants’ looking patterns and their judgments demonstrated that counterfactual simulation played a critical role. Participants simulated where the target ball would have gone if the candidate cause had been removed from the scene. The more certain participants were that the outcome would have been different, the stronger the causal judgments. These results provide the first direct evidence for spontaneous counterfactual simulation in an important domain of high-level cognition.
%B Psychological Science %V 73 %8 10/2017 %G eng %U http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617713053 %! Psychol Sci %) First Published online October 17, 2017 %R 10.1177/0956797617713053 %0 Journal Article %J Psychological Science %D 2017 %T Eye-Tracking Causality %A Tobias Gerstenberg %A M.F. Peterson %A Noah D. Goodman %A D. A. Lagnado %A Joshua B. Tenenbaum %K causality %K counterfactuals %K eye tracking %K intuitive physics %K mental simulation %X
How do people make causal judgments? What role, if any, does counterfactual simulation play? Counterfactual theories of causal judgments predict that people compare what actually happened with what would have happened if the candidate cause had been absent. Process theories predict that people focus only on what actually happened, to assess the mechanism linking candidate cause and outcome. We tracked participants’ eye movements while they judged whether one billiard ball caused another one to go through a gate or prevented it from going through. Both participants’ looking patterns and their judgments demonstrated that counterfactual simulation played a critical role. Participants simulated where the target ball would have gone if the candidate cause had been removed from the scene. The more certain participants were that the outcome would have been different, the stronger the causal judgments. These results provide the first direct evidence for spontaneous counterfactual simulation in an important domain of high-level cognition.
Recent laboratory studies have found large, stable individual differences in the location people first fixate when identifying faces, ranging from the brows to the mouth. Importantly, this variation is strongly associated with differences in fixation-specific identification performance such that an individual’s recognition ability is maximized when looking at their preferred location (Mehoudar, Arizpe, Baker, & Yovel, 2014; Peterson & Eckstein, 2013). This finding suggests that face representations are retinotopic and individuals enact gaze strategies that optimize identification, yet the extent to which this behavior reflects real-world gaze behavior is unknown. Here, we used mobile eye-trackers to test whether individual differences in face-gaze generalize from lab to real-world vision. In-lab fixations were measured with a speeded face identification task, while real-world behavior was measured as subjects freely walked around the MIT campus. We found a strong correlation between the patterns of individual differences in face-gaze in the laboratory and real-world settings. Our findings support the hypothesis that individuals optimize real-world face identification by consistently fixating the same location and thus strongly constraining the space of retinotopic input. The methods developed for this study entailed collecting a large set of high-definition, wide field-of-view natural videos from head-mounted cameras and the viewer’s fixation position, allowing us to characterize subject’s actually-experienced real-world retinotopic images. These images enable us to ask how vision is optimized not just for the statistics of the “natural images” found in web databases, but of the truly natural, retinotopic images that have landed on actual human retinae during real-world experience.
%B Journal of Vision %V 16 %8 05/2016 %G eng %U http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2524135&resultClick=1 %N 7 %& 12 %R 10.1167/16.7.12. %0 Journal Article %J Journal of Vision %D 2016 %T Individual differences in face-looking behavior generalize from the lab to the world. %A M.F. Peterson %A J. Lin %A Ian Zaun %A Nancy Kanwisher %B Journal of Vision %G eng