The influence of emotional picture thematic content on exploratory eye movements

Abstract

In picture viewing, emotional vs. neutral stimuli could play a different role in eye movement parameters and in the spatial progression of the scanpath. The aim of this paper is to investigate exploratory behaviour of normal subjects during the vision of emotional vs. non-emotional stimuli, by considering to what extent the thematic content (animate vs. inanimate) is likely to influence the observer’s eye movements. Sixty-five subjects’ eye movement patterns were measured while looking to emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) and neutral pictures depicting animate or inanimate contents. Results showed that the number of fixations and the gaze duration were greater for emotional pictures than for neutral ones, and animate pictures were fixated longer than inanimate ones. Both emotional and animate pictures may affect eye movements and constitute privileged stimuli of adaptive behavioural tendencies.

Gaze behavior in single-page monomodal and cross-modal switches as affected by Event construal

“…Object / Recipient, Patient / Inactive participant, Facial movements of participant, Author / Speaker lower the gaze costs. These results do partially correlate with the results reported in [3,4,5,23,25]; however, we revealed that dynamicity, interactionality, emotionality produce steady negative and positive gaze effects in Text AOIs in cross-modal switches, whereas in monomodal switches referent prominence and space location were most counted. Additionally, fictionality revealed in [6,27] is not found as potent in the attested stimuli.…”

“…In recent years, eye-tracking research in cross-modal (for instance, in text and image) and monomodal switches has become an integral component of usability multimedia and VR studies. Gaze costs are explored as contingent on 1) foregrounding effects in pictorial modality [8,33] or language modality [2,8,14,30], 2) spatial effects in bimodal systems [18,23,25], 3) types of tasks performed [4,12,24], 4) several cognitive foregrounding effects, for instance dynamicity and agentivity [28,35], 5) cross-modal information mapping [1,30,37]. Although prognostic computing has made significant progress, there are still challenges for assessing gaze effects in monomodal and bimodal systems as affected by systemic event construal.…”

The impact of animacy and speech rhythm on the word order of conjuncts in German preschoolers and adults

“…Furthermore, effects of ANIM on word order in naming two pictures in a conjoined noun phrase could be due to visual salience. In an eye tracking study, Carniglia, Carputi, Manfredi, Zambarbieri, and Pessa (2012) showed that there is a bias for fixations to pictures with animate referents compared to those with inanimate referents. The former were earlier, longer, and more often fixated than the latter.…”

From Abstract Symbols to Emotional (In-)Sights: An Eye Tracking Study on the Effects of Emotional Vignettes and Pictures

“…Although the special role of negatively valenced stimuli (e.g., snakes) has been put forward (e.g., Fox et al, 2000;Yiend and Mathews, 2001;Calvo et al, 2006), the majority of results rather supports the existence of arousal-driven, valence-independent effects. Hence, emotional compared to neutral stimuli were found to initially attract and maintain attentional processes (Calvo and Lang, 2004;Calvo and Avero, 2005;Nummenmaa et al, 2006;Carniglia et al, 2012).…”