School of Biological and Chemical Science, Queen Mary College, University of London, London, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2012;7(6):e39060. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0039060. Epub 2012 Jun 29.
Several studies have reported that task instructions influence eye-movement behavior during static image observation. In contrast, during dynamic scene observation we show that while the specificity of the goal of a task influences observers' beliefs about where they look, the goal does not in turn influence eye-movement patterns. In our study observers watched short video clips of a single tennis match and were asked to make subjective judgments about the allocation of visual attention to the items presented in the clip (e.g., ball, players, court lines, and umpire). However, before attending to the clips, observers were either told to simply watch clips (non-specific goal), or they were told to watch the clips with a view to judging which of the two tennis players was awarded the point (specific goal). The results of subjective reports suggest that observers believed that they allocated their attention more to goal-related items (e.g. court lines) if they performed the goal-specific task. However, we did not find the effect of goal specificity on major eye-movement parameters (i.e., saccadic amplitudes, inter-saccadic intervals, and gaze coherence). We conclude that the specificity of a task goal can alter observer's beliefs about their attention allocation strategy, but such task-driven meta-attentional modulation does not necessarily correlate with eye-movement behavior.
已有多项研究报告称，任务指令会影响静态图像观察过程中的眼动行为。相比之下，在动态场景观察中，我们发现虽然任务目标的特异性会影响观察者对注视位置的看法，但目标本身并不会反过来影响眼动模式。在我们的研究中，观察者观看了一段单一网球比赛的短视频剪辑，并被要求对剪辑中呈现的项目的视觉注意力分配做出主观判断（例如球、球员、球场线和裁判）。然而，在观看剪辑之前，观察者要么被告知只需观看剪辑（无特定目标），要么被告知观看剪辑，以便判断两名网球运动员中谁获得了这一分（特定目标）。主观报告的结果表明，如果观察者执行特定目标的任务，他们会认为自己将注意力更多地分配到与目标相关的项目（例如球场线）上。然而，我们没有发现目标特异性对主要眼动参数（即扫视幅度、扫视间间隔和注视连贯性）的影响。我们的结论是，任务目标的特异性可以改变观察者对其注意力分配策略的看法，但这种由任务驱动的元注意调制不一定与眼动行为相关。
