Robot eyes and humans fix on different things to decode a scene

Machine minds are often described as black boxes, their decision-making processes all but inscrutable. But in the case of machine intelligence, researchers are cracking that black box open and peering inside. What they find is that humans and machines don't pay attention to the same things when they look at pictures – not at all. Researchers at Facebook and Virginia Tech in Blacksburg got humans and machines to look at pictures and answer simple questions – a task that neural-network-based artificial intelligence can handle. They wanted to map human and AI attention, in order to shed a little light on the differences between us and them.