Searching and fixating: Scale-invariance vs. characteristic timescales in attentional processes

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Published 8 June 2011 Europhysics Letters Association
, , Citation D. P. Shinde et al 2011 EPL 94 68001 DOI 10.1209/0295-5075/94/68001

0295-5075/94/6/68001

Abstract

In an experiment involving semantic search, the visual movements of sample populations subjected to visual and aural input were tracked in a taskless paradigm. The probability distributions of saccades and fixations were obtained and analyzed. Scale-invariance was observed in the saccadic distributions, while the fixation distributions revealed the presence of a characteristic (attentional) time scale for literate subjects. A detailed analysis of our results suggests that saccadic eye motions are an example of Levy, rather than Brownian, dynamics.

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10.1209/0295-5075/94/68001