Effects of individual’s emotions on saliency and visual search

Abstract

Psychological studies have already proven a connection between emotional stimuli and visual attention. However, there is a lack of evidence of how much an individual’s mood influences visual information processing of emotionally neutral stimuli. In contrast to prior studies, we explored the effect of positive mood on bottom-up low-level visual saliency. In our extensive experimental studies, we induced positive or neutral emotions in 106 subjects using a psychological method of autobiographical memories and listening to positive music and then performed an eye-tracking study with three task types—free viewing, memorizing the image content and visual search tasks. We explored differences in the human gaze behaviour between both emotions and relate them to the bottom-up attention correlation between emotionally aroused and non-aroused subjects. We observed that positive emotions induce a strong broadening and engagement effect on the bottom-up attention while performing all task types. On the other hand, we found out that certain tasks are solved less efficiently when experiencing a positive mood. Therefore, we claim that positive mood may also act as a distractor while performing certain types of tasks.