Universität Bielefeld - Sonderforschungsbereich 360

Disambiguating Complex Visual Information: Towards Communication of Personal Views of a Scene

Marc Pomplun, Helge Ritter, Boris Velichkovsky

Abstract

Two experiments on perception and eye-movement scanning of a set of 6 overtly ambiguous pictures are reported. In the first experiment it was shown that specific percetual interpretations of an ambiguous picture usually correlate with parameters of the gaze-position distributions. In the second experiment these distributions were used for an image-processing of initial pictures in such a way that in regions which attracted less fixations the brightness of all elements was lowered. The pre-processed pictures were then shown to a group of 150 naive subjects for an identification. The results of this experiment demonstrated that in 4 out of 6 pictures it was possible to influence perception of other persons in the predicted way, i.e. to shift spontaneous reports of naive subjects in the direction of interpretations that accompanied gaze-position data used for the pre-processing of initial pictures. Possible reasons for a failure of such a communication of personal views in two cases are also discussed.

Postscript-File (~ 1330 k)
Anke Weinberger, 1995-02-23