Rösler Lara, End Albert, Gamer Matthias
Department of Psychology, Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
Department of Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2017 Jul 25;12(7):e0182037. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182037. eCollection 2017.
Saliency-based models of visual attention postulate that, when a scene is freely viewed, attention is predominantly allocated to those elements that stand out in terms of their physical properties. However, eye-tracking studies have shown that saliency models fail to predict gaze behavior accurately when social information is included in an image. Notably, gaze pattern analyses revealed that depictions of human beings are heavily prioritized independent of their low-level physical saliency. What remains unknown, however, is whether the prioritization of such social features is a reflexive or a voluntary process. To investigate the early stages of social attention in more detail, participants viewed photographs of naturalistic scenes with and without social features (i.e., human heads or bodies) for 200 ms while their eye movements were being recorded. We observed significantly more first eye movements to regions containing social features than would be expected from a chance level distribution of saccades. Additionally, a generalized linear mixed model analysis revealed that the social content of a region better predicted first saccade direction than its saliency suggesting that social features partially override the impact of low-level physical saliency on gaze patterns. Given the brief image presentation time that precluded visual exploration, our results provide compelling evidence for a reflexive component in social attention. Moreover, the present study emphasizes the importance of considering social influences for a more coherent understanding of human attentional selection.
基于显著性的视觉注意力模型假定，当自由观看一个场景时，注意力主要分配给那些在物理属性方面突出的元素。然而，眼动追踪研究表明，当图像中包含社会信息时，显著性模型无法准确预测注视行为。值得注意的是，注视模式分析显示，人类的描绘被高度优先考虑，而与它们的低层次物理显著性无关。然而，尚不清楚的是，这种社会特征的优先化是一个反射性还是自愿性的过程。为了更详细地研究社会注意力的早期阶段，参与者观看了带有和不带有社会特征（即人头或人体）的自然场景照片200毫秒，同时记录他们的眼动。我们观察到，与扫视的随机水平分布预期相比，更多的第一眼动显著指向包含社会特征的区域。此外，广义线性混合模型分析表明，一个区域的社会内容比其显著性更好地预测了第一眼跳方向，这表明社会特征部分地超越了低层次物理显著性对注视模式的影响。鉴于短暂的图像呈现时间排除了视觉探索，我们的结果为社会注意力中的反射性成分提供了令人信服的证据。此外，本研究强调了考虑社会影响对于更连贯地理解人类注意力选择的重要性。
