Abstract
Visual memory has been demonstrated to play a role in both visual search and attentional prioritization in natural scenes. However, it has been studied predominantly in experimental paradigms using multiple two-dimensional images. Natural experience, however, entails prolonged immersion in a limited number of three-dimensional environments. The goal of the present experiment was to recreate circumstances comparable to natural visual experience in order to evaluate the role of scene memory in guiding eye movements in a natural environment. Subjects performed a continuous visual-search task within an immersive virtual-reality environment over three days. We found that, similar to two-dimensional contexts, viewers rapidly learn the location of objects in the environment over time, and use spatial memory to guide search. Incidental fixations did not provide obvious benefit to subsequent search, suggesting that semantic contextual cues may often be just as efficient, or that many incidentally fixated items are not held in memory in the absence of a specific task. On the third day of the experience in the environment, previous search items changed in color. These items were fixated upon with increased probability relative to control objects, suggesting that memory-guided prioritization (or Surprise) may be a robust mechanisms for attracting gaze to novel features of natural environments, in addition to task factors and simple spatial saliency.
Highlights
How are visual scenes represented in memory? Evidence is accumulating that such representations are multi-faceted
The goal of the present study was to understand the role that scene memory might play in the allocation of attention and eye movements in natural, ordinary vision, and appreciate how it may differ from laboratory settings
An Applied Science Laboratory (ASL) eye tracker recorded the position of the left eye at a sampling rate of 60 Hz and an accuracy of approximately one degree
Summary
How are visual scenes represented in memory? Evidence is accumulating that such representations are multi-faceted. Some of the evidence was taken to indicate that coherent object representations decayed rapidly following withdrawal of attention from an object [5,6]. Scene context appears to facilitate subsequent visual search for targets even after a single prior exposure [13,14,15]. It appears that the change blindness phenomenon leads to an underestimate of the extent of visual scene representations [8, 10, 13]
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