Abstract
In natural vision both stimulus features and cognitive/affective factors influence an observer’s attention. However, the relationship between stimulus-driven (“bottom-up”) and cognitive/affective (“top-down”) factors remains controversial: Can affective salience counteract strong visual stimulus signals and shift attention allocation irrespective of bottom-up features? Is there any difference between negative and positive scenes in terms of their influence on attention deployment? Here we examined the impact of affective factors on eye movement behavior, to understand the competition between visual stimulus-driven salience and affective salience and how they affect gaze allocation in complex scene viewing. Building on our previous research, we compared predictions generated by a visual salience model with measures indexing participant-identified emotionally meaningful regions of each image. To examine how eye movement behavior differs for negative, positive, and neutral scenes, we examined the influence of affective salience in capturing attention according to emotional valence. Taken together, our results show that affective salience can override stimulus-driven salience and overall emotional valence can determine attention allocation in complex scenes. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive/affective factors play a dominant role in active gaze control.
Highlights
In natural vision human observers sequentially allocate focal attention to sub-regions of a scene (James, 1890)
Our results showed that, when participants freely viewed complex scenes, the proportion of fixations allocated to affective relative to visual salience ROIs was associated with higher ratings of emotional arousal, such that viewing emotionally arousing stimuli increased the likelihood of fixating in emotionally salient regions
The relationship between arousal and likelihood of fixating in affectively salient regions was similar for both negative and positive images, there was an overall higher proportion of fixations allocated to affective ROIs in images which had an overall negative valence
Summary
In natural vision human observers sequentially allocate focal attention to sub-regions of a scene (James, 1890). Such attention shifts are typically associated with eye movement behavior (Rizzolatti et al, 1987). Shifts of attention and eye movements are initiated toward the point with the highest salience, which is inhibited so that attention can be disengaged and be moved to the most salient location In this way, these visual salience models suggest a control mechanism for dynamically targeting eye movements. These visual salience models suggest a control mechanism for dynamically targeting eye movements These models suggest that low-level feature discontinuities represented in the salience map can explain a significant proportion of where people look. They specify filters that quantify visual conspicuity, a measure of what is perceived as significantly distinct from its local background of each part of the scene
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