Abstract
Although visual attention studies consider color as one of the most important features in guiding visual attention, few studies have investigated how color influences eye movements while viewing natural scenes without any particular task. To better understand the visual features that drive attention, the aim of this paper was to quantify the influence of color on eye movements when viewing dynamic natural scenes. The influence of color was investigated by comparing the eye positions of several observers eye-tracked while viewing video stimuli in two conditions: color and grayscale. The comparison was made using the dispersion between the eye positions of observers, the number of attractive regions measured with a clustering method applied to the eye positions, and by comparing eye positions to the predictions of a saliency model. The mean amplitude of saccades and the mean duration of fixations were compared as well. Globally, a slight influence of color on eye movements was measured; only the number of attractive regions for color stimuli was slightly higher than for grayscale stimuli. However, a luminance-based saliency model predicts the eye positions for color stimuli as efficiently as for grayscale stimuli.
Highlights
Visual attention has been conceptualized in theories such as the Filter Model (Broadbent, 1958) and the Feature Integration Theory (FIT) (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)
We examined the effect of color, both globally and as a function of the category, on different parameters extracted from recorded eye movements: the eye positions, the duration of the fixations, and the amplitude of the saccades
We studied the influence of color on the variability between the eye positions of the different participants using the dispersion metric
Summary
Visual attention has been conceptualized in theories such as the Filter Model (Broadbent, 1958) and the Feature Integration Theory (FIT) (Treisman & Gelade, 1980). According to the FIT, elementary visual features such as intensity, color and orientation are processed in parallel at the pre-attentive stage, and subsequently combined to drive the focus of attention. Based on this theory, Wolfe and colleagues introduced the Guided Search Model (GSM) and studied the elementary visual features that are involved in guiding attention using visual search tasks (Wolfe, Cave, & Franzel, 1989). Wolfe and colleagues introduced the Guided Search Model (GSM) and studied the elementary visual features that are involved in guiding attention using visual search tasks (Wolfe, Cave, & Franzel, 1989) These studies provided a list of the most important visual features that drive visual attention which is in accordance with the selectivity of the cortical cells.
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