Abstract
Several studies have reported that task instructions influence eye-movement behavior during static image observation. In contrast, during dynamic scene observation we show that while the specificity of the goal of a task influences observers’ beliefs about where they look, the goal does not in turn influence eye-movement patterns. In our study observers watched short video clips of a single tennis match and were asked to make subjective judgments about the allocation of visual attention to the items presented in the clip (e.g., ball, players, court lines, and umpire). However, before attending to the clips, observers were either told to simply watch clips (non-specific goal), or they were told to watch the clips with a view to judging which of the two tennis players was awarded the point (specific goal). The results of subjective reports suggest that observers believed that they allocated their attention more to goal-related items (e.g. court lines) if they performed the goal-specific task. However, we did not find the effect of goal specificity on major eye-movement parameters (i.e., saccadic amplitudes, inter-saccadic intervals, and gaze coherence). We conclude that the specificity of a task goal can alter observer’s beliefs about their attention allocation strategy, but such task-driven meta-attentional modulation does not necessarily correlate with eye-movement behavior.
Highlights
Eye-movements are involved in virtually all human activities
By calculating the changes in ranking for the four clips which were presented both in Block 1 and Block 2, the between-group difference is significant in the ‘point-related items’ (p = .021) and the ‘peripheral items’ (p = .013), but again non-significant in terms of group difference in the ‘central items’ (p..6). These results suggest that, according to an immediate retrospective recalling, participants observing the game with SG believed that they allocated more attention to items relevant to making a point decision, and allocated less attention to items irrelevant to making that decision
Knowledge of the effects of task instruction on eye-movement behavior comes mostly from studies of eye-movement recordings taken during static scene observation
Summary
Eye-movements are involved in virtually all human activities. Because of limited retinal resolution and limited processing resources, seeking out information in a dynamic visual scene to support ongoing cognitive and behavioral activities requires constant redirection of gaze and attention. There have been two distinct theories of human attentional allocation and eye-movement control, and they make different claims about how prioritization of visual information processing is achieved This can either be through top-down, goaldriven attentional selection or else via bottom-up stimulus-driven attentional selection. The contrary extreme top-down account instead proposes that observer’s fixations are purely controlled by goal oriented, top-down mechanisms [11,12,13,14] Support for the latter hypothesis comes from evidence that eye-movements are strongly influenced by cognitive factors, such as contextual meaning, the observer’s knowledge, and the demands of the task [2,3,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. For complex natural scene viewing, the claim is that visual saliency has a limited role in the guidance of our gaze, and that our gaze is directed toward sites that are important for understanding the meaning of the scene in the context of the ongoing task [11,12,13]
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