Automatizing of visual attention

Perceptual automatizing was argued to occur as a consequence of repeated experience with a stimulus. Automatizing was hypothesized to entail a stereotyping in sampling of sensory information together with an attendant decrease in the rate of sampling of that information. An experiment was performed in which human Ss observed stimulus pictures for several trials, during which records were made of their visual fixations. It was found that fixation rate habituated and that this habituation was accompanied by a reduction in the uncertainty (entropy) of the spatial distributions of fixations. These results were interpreted as evidence for automatizing of visual fixation processes. Analysis of eye-movement distances suggested a possible mechanism for the reported loss of vividness of a stimulus which is perceived habitually.