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Item Gaze Cuing, Familiarity, and the Self(North Dakota State University, 2009) Wadeson, Heather KayAttention researchers have known for over a decade that people have a tendency to shift their attention automatically to a location gazed at by another person (e.g., Friesen & Kingstone, 1998). This social orienting appears to be reflexive in nature, and yet it also seems to be influenced by contextual factors and individual differences (for a review, see Frischen & Tipper, 2007). In the present document, I investigated how the familiarity of the gaze cue provider influences individuals' tendency to shift attention to a gazed-at location. The main questions addressed in the research are: (1) What is the role of familiarity in responding to gaze direction? and (2) If an effect of familiarity is observed, does it generalize to the situation of orienting in response to one1s own gaze direction? My results indicated that participants did orient to a gaze cue provided by their own face, as well as to gaze cues provided by the faces of a friend and a same-sex stranger. Findings which address the roles of the familiarity of the gazing face and of individual differences (i.e., self-esteem, autistic tendencies) among participants will also be discussed.Item The Relationship Between Features and Edge Types in Natural Images(North Dakota State University, 2011) George, Jonathon MichaelOne of the most important processes in the human visual system involves detecting and understanding edges. Edges allow humans to break a visual scene up into meaningful chunks of information. Without edges, a visual scene is meaningless. As important as edges are to human visual perception, how they are detected and classified is not well understood. This study provides evidence that humans are able to classify edges into appropriate categories when enough visual information is presented but objects in the scene are not detectable. In addition, this study shows that regions of interest (RO Is) of a particular edge type can be clustered according to similarities in structure using a simple algorithm. This study examines the relationship between image features (i.e. closure, texture & repetition) and the type or cause of an edge (i.e. albedo, depth, shadow & specular) in natural visual scenes. Two groups of human subjects were used to carry out the current study; the cause estimators (CEs) and the feature experts (FEs). The CEs were asked to state the cause of an edge presented in a ROI. The FEs were asked to label specific features for the same set of RO Is as the CEs. The first analysis describes the relationship between image features and the actual cause of the edge in the ROis presented. The second analysis describes the relationship between image features and the cause estimation provided by the CEs. This study provides evidence that closure, texture and repetition may help to inform human observers as to the cause of an edge when limited but sufficient visual information is available.