Initial scene representations facilitate eye movement guidance in visual search.

Abstract

What role does the initial glimpse of a scene play in subsequent eye movement guidance? In 4 experiments, a brief scene preview was followed by object search through the scene via a small moving window that was tied to fixation position. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the scene preview resulted in more efficient eye movements compared with a control preview. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this scene preview benefit was not due to the conceptual category of the scene or identification of the target object in the preview. Experiment 4 demonstrated that the scene preview benefit was unaffected by changing the size of the scene from preview to search. Taken together, the results suggest that an abstract (size invariant) visual representation is generated in an initial scene glimpse and that this representation can be retained in memory and used to guide subsequent eye movements.Keywords: scene perception, eye movements, gaze control, visual search A good deal of information can be acquired from an initial brief glimpse of a real-world scene

Worth a quick look? Initial scene previews can guide eye movements as a function of domain-specific expertise but can also have unforeseen costs.

“…In line with previous research (e.g., Castelhano & Henderson, 2007;Võ & Henderson, 2010), all metrics indicated search for everyday objects from real-world scenes was more efficient when participants were presented with a scene preview than a mask preview.…”

“…First, a major component of how the scene-context guides search is that observers learn the spatial relationships between scenes and the objects within (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007;Castelhano & Heaven, 2010). As a result, the scene-context can guide search towards likely target locations, even when targets were not present in previews.…”

“…These improvements in search are thought to be the product of the initially generated scene representation interacting with the target knowledge activated from viewing the presented target word (Hillstrom, Schloley, Liversedge, Benson, 2012), or picture (Castelhano & Heaven, 2010). Moreover, the scene preview benefit exists even when the target object is not visible during the preview but only found through windowed search, thereby confirming the benefit of scene-context processing, irrespective of any additional local target processing that could occur when targets are actually present during previews (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007;Võ & Henderson, 2010).…”

“…A more problematic issue with time-to-first fixation data is that it is obtained from eye tracking experiments under free viewing conditions, whereby the observer has constant access to the whole scene via peripheral vision, making it difficult to isolate the specific contribution of the initial scene preview on subsequent eye movement behaviour (Donovan & Litchfield, 2013). In the present study we make use of the recently developed gaze contingent 'flash-preview moving window' (FPMW) paradigm (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007) as it dissociates the initial scene representation from the ongoing scene representation obtained during search.…”

Mental representations of arithmetic facts: Evidence from eye movement recordings supports the preferred operand-order-specific representation hypothesis

“…The HEOG measurements, however, were sensitive enough to detect a significant operand order effect. It should be noted that previous studies have also shown dissociations between behavioural data and eye movement data (e.g., Castelhano & Henderson, 2007). For example, Castelhano and Henderson recorded eye movements to explore whether the information acquired from a scene in an initial glimpse can facilitate subsequent eye movements, and they found significant effects in eye movement data, but not in reaction time data.…”