Active Information Retrieval in Scene Perception and Object Learning

We pick out task-relevant information from the visual scene by moving our eyes and confidently manipulate our near-environment to achieve our goals. A better understanding of human behavior can be achieved by adopting this perspective. That is, humans are active (not passive observers). In my talk, I will address how we characterize natural information-seeking behavior in human participants in two context: a) scene processing, b) object learning. The first addresses how unrestrained gaze behavior can be characterized in terms of the information that is available in the scene. Here, I will explain why and how we eschew pure bottom-up procedures of using low-level image statistics to predict gaze movements. Next, I will discuss how we select which views of unfamiliar objects to learn, when we are free to manipulate them in 3D