[extropy-chat] Bayesian Surprise Attracts Human Attention

[Amara Graps]

http://ilab.usc.edu/publications/Itti_Baldi06nips.html

L. Itti, P. Baldi, Bayesian Surprise Attracts Human Attention, In:
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Vol. 19
(NIPS*2005), pp. 1-8, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press,  2006.

Abstract: The concept of surprise is central to sensory processing,
adaptation, learning, and attention. Yet, no widely-accepted
mathematical theory currently exists to quantitatively characterize
surprise elicited by a stimulus or event, for observers that range
from single neurons to complex natural or engineered systems. We
describe a formal Bayesian definition of surprise that is the only
consistent formulation under minimal axiomatic assumptions. Surprise
quantifies how data affects a natural or artificial observer, by
measuring the difference between posterior and prior beliefs of the
observer. Using this framework we measure the extent to which humans
direct their gaze towards surprising items while watching television
and video games. We find that subjects are strongly attracted towards
surprising locations, with 72 percent of all human gaze shifts
directed towards locations more surprising than the average, a figure
which rises to 84 percent when considering only gaze targets
simultaneously selected by all subjects. The resulting theory of
surprise is applicable across different spatio-temporal scales,
modalities, and levels of abstraction.

Themes: Bayesian Theory of Surprise, Computational Modeling, Model of
Bottom-Up Saliency-Based Visual Attention, Model of Top-Down
Attentional Modulation, Human Eye-Tracking Research

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Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
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"Why speculate when you can calculate?"  ---John Baez