Chapter 26 - Congruency, saliency and gist in the inspection of objects in natural scenes

Abstract

Early studies of the inspection of scenes suggested that eye fixations are attracted to objects that are incongruent with the gist of a picture, whereas more recent studies have questioned this conclusion. The two experiments presented in the chapter investigate the potency of incongruent objects in attracting eye fixations during the inspection of pictures of real-world scenes. Pictures sometimes contained an object that violated the gist, such as a cow grazing on a ski slope, and the question asked was whether fixations were attracted to these objects earlier than when they appeared in congruent contexts. In both experiments earlier fixation of incongruent objects was recorded, suggesting a role for peripheral vision in the early comprehension of the gist of a scene and in the detection of anomalies.