Active vision: control of eye-movements and probabilistic planning

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Constantin Rothkopf
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409170253

A fundamental component of interacting with the world consists in acquiring task-relevant information to achieve our goals. What makes this a difficult problem is the inescapable probabilistic nature of our world. Gaze selection is the epitomic behavior in which multiple uncertainties about the state of the world and the consequences of our actions interact. To reduce the uncertainty about our visual environment, we sequentially move our eyes towards different parts of the scene. Based on the acquired information and internal states we decide where to direct gaze next. Accordingly, in an uncertain and dynamic world, it is particularly important to adopt strategies that handle these uncertainties in such a way, that we can successfully achieve our goals. With this project we will investigate experimentally and quantify human behavior in sequential tasks that require human subjects to detect targets with controlled spatial and temporal statistics. Importantly, we will develop normative computational models of these tasks based on probabilistic inference and optimal control to understand the observed human behavior. First, we will investigate, how human blinking adjusts to environmental event statistics and task demands. Secondly, we will investigate how spatial and temporal target selection of human gaze sequences depends on internal costs, task benefits, and beliefs about environmental regularities. The relevance of these questions extends well beyond cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience and related fields such as AI or human-machine-interaction, as the human capabilities of handling multiple sources of uncertainty is not well understood and still unmatched by artificial systems.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants