Underwood Geoffrey, Foulsham Tom
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2006 Nov;59(11):1931-49. doi: 10.1080/17470210500416342.
Models of low-level saliency predict that when we first look at a photograph our first few eye movements should be made towards visually conspicuous objects. Two experiments investigated this prediction by recording eye fixations while viewers inspected pictures of room interiors that contained objects with known saliency characteristics. Highly salient objects did attract fixations earlier than less conspicuous objects, but only in a task requiring general encoding of the whole picture. When participants were required to detect the presence of a small target, then the visual saliency of nontarget objects did not influence fixations. These results support modifications of the model that take the cognitive override of saliency into account by allowing task demands to reduce the saliency weights of task-irrelevant objects. The pictures sometimes contained incongruent objects that were taken from other rooms. These objects were used to test the hypothesis that previous reports of the early fixation of congruent objects have not been consistent because the effect depends upon the visual conspicuity of the incongruent object. There was an effect of incongruency in both experiments, with earlier fixation of objects that violated the gist of the scene, but the effect was only apparent for inconspicuous objects, which argues against the hypothesis.
低层次显著性模型预测，当我们首次观看一张照片时，最初的几次眼动应该是朝向视觉上显著的物体。两项实验通过记录观看者检查包含具有已知显著性特征物体的室内场景图片时的眼动注视情况，对这一预测进行了研究。高显著性物体确实比不太显著的物体更早吸引注视，但这仅在一项需要对整个图片进行总体编码的任务中如此。当要求参与者检测一个小目标的存在时，非目标物体的视觉显著性并不会影响注视。这些结果支持对该模型进行修正，即通过允许任务需求降低与任务无关物体的显著性权重，来考虑显著性的认知优先性。图片有时包含从其他房间选取的不协调物体。这些物体被用于检验这样一个假设，即先前关于一致物体早期注视的报告不一致，是因为这种效应取决于不协调物体的视觉显著性。在两项实验中都存在不协调效应，与场景主旨相悖的物体更早被注视，但这种效应仅在不显著物体中明显，这与该假设相悖。
