Estimating Central, Peripheral, and Temporal Visual Contributions to Human Decision Making in Atari Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Krauss, Henrik, Yairi, Takehisa
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Krauss, Henrik
Yairi, Takehisa
author_facet Krauss, Henrik
Yairi, Takehisa
contents We study how different visual information sources contribute to human decision making in dynamic visual environments. Using Atari-HEAD, a large-scale Atari gameplay dataset with synchronized eye-tracking, we introduce a controlled ablation framework as a means to reverse-engineer the contribution of peripheral visual information, explicit gaze information in form of gaze maps, and past-state information from human behavior. We train action-prediction networks under six settings that selectively include or exclude these information sources. Across 20 games, peripheral information shows by far the strongest contribution, with median prediction-accuracy drops in the range of 35.27-43.90% when removed. Gaze information yields smaller drops of 2.11-2.76%, while past-state information shows a broader range of 1.52-15.51%, with the upper end likely more informative due to reduced peripheral-information leakage. To complement aggregate accuracies, we cluster states by true-action probabilities assigned by the different model configurations. This analysis identifies coarse behavioral regimes, including focus-dominated, periphery-dominated, and more contextual decision situations. These results suggest that human decision making in Atari depends strongly on information beyond the current focus of gaze, while the proposed framework provides a way to estimate such information-source contributions from behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04439
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Central, Peripheral, and Temporal Visual Contributions to Human Decision Making in Atari Games
Krauss, Henrik
Yairi, Takehisa
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We study how different visual information sources contribute to human decision making in dynamic visual environments. Using Atari-HEAD, a large-scale Atari gameplay dataset with synchronized eye-tracking, we introduce a controlled ablation framework as a means to reverse-engineer the contribution of peripheral visual information, explicit gaze information in form of gaze maps, and past-state information from human behavior. We train action-prediction networks under six settings that selectively include or exclude these information sources. Across 20 games, peripheral information shows by far the strongest contribution, with median prediction-accuracy drops in the range of 35.27-43.90% when removed. Gaze information yields smaller drops of 2.11-2.76%, while past-state information shows a broader range of 1.52-15.51%, with the upper end likely more informative due to reduced peripheral-information leakage. To complement aggregate accuracies, we cluster states by true-action probabilities assigned by the different model configurations. This analysis identifies coarse behavioral regimes, including focus-dominated, periphery-dominated, and more contextual decision situations. These results suggest that human decision making in Atari depends strongly on information beyond the current focus of gaze, while the proposed framework provides a way to estimate such information-source contributions from behavior.
title Estimating Central, Peripheral, and Temporal Visual Contributions to Human Decision Making in Atari Games
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04439