Attention
Do we look at what matters, or at what stands out?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Objects that people consider important in a scene are looked at more and more centrally, and boosting an object's contrast draws the eyes to it without changing that underlying importance effect.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Eye-tracking during 3-s free viewing of photographs in which contrast of one object ('common' = often named as characteristic, or 'rare') was decreased (Exp 1) or increased (Exp 2), followed by typing up to 5 keywords describing the scene
- N
- N=36 · 36 volunteers in total: 16 in Experiment 1 (contrast decreases) and 20 in Experiment 2 (contrast increases plus neutral images); each scene was seen in each condition by four observers
- Population
- Healthy German-speaking adult volunteers naive to the study's purpose
- Outcome
- Proportion of fixations landing on the object, whether the object was mentioned in keywords, and fixation distance from the object's centre
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Key findings
Common objects drew a larger share of fixations than rare objects in both experiments. Raising an object's contrast increased fixations on it in a roughly linear way whether it was common or rare, but lowering contrast had almost no effect. Any contrast increase made rare objects as likely to be mentioned as common ones, regardless of its size, yet common objects still received more fixations. Fixations on common objects also landed closer to the object's centre than fixations on rare objects.
Methodology
Participants viewed art photographs of everyday scenes for 3 seconds while their eye movements were recorded, then typed up to five keywords describing the scene. In each scene the researchers picked a 'common' object that earlier viewers often named as characteristic and a size-matched 'rare' object seldom named, and altered the luminance contrast of one of them. Experiment 1 reduced contrast by 20% or 80%; Experiment 2 increased it by 75% or 150% relative to a lower-contrast neutral version.
Limitations
The samples were small (16 and 20 observers, with four observers per scene and condition), and the authors acknowledge a contrast effect on where fixations land within objects might appear with more power. The scenes were artistically composed photographs chosen to contain many objects, so the findings may not apply to arbitrary real-world scenes, and hidden object properties such as foreground versus background position were not fully controlled; common objects tended to sit lower in the image. The two experiments used different neutral baselines, so they cannot be directly compared with each other. Importance was measured only by naming in keywords, which may be influenced by language.
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