Stirk Jonathan A, Underwood Geoffrey
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.
J Vis. 2007 Jul 11;7(10):3.1-10. doi: 10.1167/7.10.3.
Saliency models of eye guidance during scene perception suggest that attention is drawn to visually conspicuous areas having high visual salience. Despite such low-level visual processes controlling the allocation of attention, higher level information gained from scene knowledge may also control eye movements. This is supported by the findings of eye-tracking studies demonstrating that scene-inconsistent objects are often fixated earlier than their consistent counterparts. Using a change blindness paradigm, changes were made to objects that were either consistent or inconsistent with the scene and that had been measured as having high or low visual salience (according to objective measurements). Results showed that change detection speed and accuracy for objects with high visual salience did not differ from those having low visual salience. However, changes in scene-inconsistent objects were detected faster and with higher accuracy than those in scene-consistent objects for both high and low visually salient objects. We conclude that the scene-inconsistent change detection advantage is a true top-down effect and is not confounded by low-level visual factors and may indeed override such factors when viewing complex naturalistic scenes.
场景感知过程中眼睛引导的显著性模型表明，注意力会被吸引到具有高视觉显著性的视觉显著区域。尽管这种低层次视觉过程控制着注意力的分配，但从场景知识中获得的高层次信息也可能控制眼球运动。这得到了眼动追踪研究结果的支持，这些研究表明，与场景不一致的物体往往比与其一致的物体更早被注视。使用变化盲视范式，对与场景一致或不一致且已被测量为具有高或低视觉显著性（根据客观测量）的物体进行了变化。结果表明，高视觉显著性物体的变化检测速度和准确性与低视觉显著性物体的没有差异。然而，对于高视觉显著性和低视觉显著性物体，与场景不一致的物体的变化都比与场景一致的物体的变化检测得更快且准确性更高。我们得出结论，场景不一致变化检测优势是一种真正的自上而下的效应，不受低层次视觉因素的混淆，并且在观看复杂自然场景时可能确实会超越这些因素。
