Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2023 Mar;76(3):632-648. doi: 10.1177/17470218221101334. Epub 2022 Jun 8.
Models of visual search in scenes include image salience as a source of attentional guidance. However, because scene meaning is correlated with image salience, it could be that the salience predictor in these models is driven by meaning. To test this proposal, we generated meaning maps that represented the spatial distribution of semantic informativeness in scenes, and salience maps which represented the spatial distribution of conspicuous image features and tested their influence on fixation densities from two object search tasks in real-world scenes. The results showed that meaning accounted for significantly greater variance in fixation densities than image salience, both overall and in early attention across both studies. Here, meaning explained 58% and 63% of the theoretical ceiling of variance in attention across both studies, respectively. Furthermore, both studies demonstrated that fast initial saccades were not more likely to be directed to higher salience regions than slower initial saccades, and initial saccades of all latencies were directed to regions containing higher meaning than salience. Together, these results demonstrated that even though meaning was task-neutral, the visual system still selected meaningful over salient scene regions for attention during search.
场景中的视觉搜索模型将图像显著度作为注意力引导的来源。然而，由于场景的意义与图像显著度相关，因此这些模型中的显著度预测器可能是由意义驱动的。为了验证这一假设，我们生成了代表场景中语义信息量空间分布的意义图，以及代表显著图像特征空间分布的显著图，并在两个真实场景中的物体搜索任务中测试了它们对注视密度的影响。结果表明，意义在注视密度上的解释程度明显高于图像显著度，无论是在两项研究的整体水平上，还是在早期注意力水平上都是如此。在这里，意义分别解释了注意力理论方差上限的 58%和 63%。此外，两项研究都表明，快速的初始眼跳并不比较慢的初始眼跳更有可能指向更高显著度的区域，而且所有潜伏期的初始眼跳都指向包含更高意义的区域，而不是更高显著度的区域。总之，这些结果表明，即使意义是任务中性的，视觉系统在搜索过程中仍然会选择有意义的场景区域来注意。
