Department of Psychology, Justus Liebig Universität, 35394 Giessen, Germany;
Experimental Psychology, University College London, WC1H 0AP London, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Jun 11;116(24):11687-11692. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1820553116. Epub 2019 May 28.
What determines where we look? Theories of attentional guidance hold that image features and task demands govern fixation behavior, while differences between observers are interpreted as a "noise-ceiling" that strictly limits predictability of fixations. However, recent twin studies suggest a genetic basis of gaze-trace similarity for a given stimulus. This leads to the question of how individuals differ in their gaze behavior and what may explain these differences. Here, we investigated the fixations of >100 human adults freely viewing a large set of complex scenes containing thousands of semantically annotated objects. We found systematic individual differences in fixation frequencies along six semantic stimulus dimensions. These differences were large (>twofold) and highly stable across images and time. Surprisingly, they also held for first fixations directed toward each image, commonly interpreted as "bottom-up" visual salience. Their perceptual relevance was documented by a correlation between individual face salience and face recognition skills. The set of reliable individual salience dimensions and their covariance pattern replicated across samples from three different countries, suggesting they reflect fundamental biological mechanisms of attention. Our findings show stable individual differences in salience along a set of fundamental semantic dimensions and that these differences have meaningful perceptual implications. Visual salience reflects features of the observer as well as the image.
是什么决定了我们的目光投向何处？注意引导理论认为，图像特征和任务需求决定了注视行为，而观察者之间的差异则被解释为一种“噪声上限”，严格限制了注视点的可预测性。然而，最近的双胞胎研究表明，对于给定的刺激，眼球追踪的相似性存在遗传基础。这就引出了一个问题，即个体在注视行为上有何差异，以及这些差异可能是由什么造成的。在这里，我们调查了 100 多名成年人在自由观看包含数千个语义注释对象的大量复杂场景时的注视点。我们发现，在六个语义刺激维度上，注视点的频率存在系统性的个体差异。这些差异很大（超过两倍），并且在图像和时间上都非常稳定。令人惊讶的是，它们也适用于指向每张图像的首次注视，通常被解释为“自下而上”的视觉显著性。个体面部显著性与面部识别能力之间的相关性证明了它们的感知相关性。这组可靠的个体显著性维度及其协方差模式在来自三个不同国家的样本中都得到了复制，这表明它们反映了注意力的基本生物机制。我们的研究结果表明，在一系列基本语义维度上，显著性存在稳定的个体差异，而且这些差异具有有意义的感知意义。视觉显著性反映了观察者和图像的特征。
