Towards A Computer Model Of Attention Fatigue

The exact mechanism of mental fatigue is still not well understood even with the long history of neuroscience and psychology. It is said a human being undergoes mental fatigue when he or she just had a prolonged session of focusing on particular sustained attention task and this could particularly dangerous for certain tasks such as driving. Directed Attention Fatigue (DAF) is caused by an identified mechanic and was described a tug of war between bottom up attention mode and top down attention mode where DAF will cause decrease focus on the task on hand. By using an eye tracker to obtain human data, this project aimed to study eye gaze pattern’s relationship with DAF. The obtained human data can be modeled into existing visual attention model which hopes to reproduce the human results. The model had to have the capability to reproduce human perception, recognition and also decision making to achieve the objective of this project. Itti and Koch Model (IKM) will be used as the base model of this project. The model overall gave reasonable results that provided certain insights into the gaze characteristics of DAF.