Bio

Anirudh Tiwathia is starting his senior year at Vassar College. He is a double major in cognitive science and computer science, and is interested in a wide variety of scientific and philosophical questions, such as the Principle of Computational Equivalence. His research so far has been in cognitive science.

Project: Eye-Tracking Cellular Automaton Patterns

Goal-free viewing of cellular automaton (CA) images addresses the nature of the bottom-up process, the robustness of salience as a framework for explaining fixation points, and the particular features that can characterize salience. This study showed higher-level structural features such as pockets of regularity within randomness or localized structures within regularity were salient for most participants. These results raise interesting questions about the kinds of visual features that can be used to characterize salience. An unexpected result is that many fixations occur in blank regions within images featuring nested (fractal) structures. Many of these findings escape current psychophysical models of oculomotor strategy.

Favorite Two-Color, Radius-2 Rule

Rule chosen: 837301587, 3528706269, 3494508071, 167508322