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Method and experiments of subliminal cueing for real-world images

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Abstract

Unconscious attention shift triggered by a subliminal cue has been shown to be automatic; however, whether it can be brought into effect for images of real-world scenes remains to be investigated. We present a subliminal cueing method that flashes briefly a visual cue before presenting a real-world image to the viewer. The effectiveness of the method is verified by experiments using three types of cues (spatial cue, face cue, and object cue) of varied durations. Results show that depending on the cue type, the viewer’s visual attention is directed to the cued visual hemifield or the cued location without engaging the viewer’s awareness. The experiments demonstrate that a brief subliminal cue presented prior to the color image of a real-world complex scene can attract human visual attention. The method is useful for many applications that require efficient, unresisting attention shift to a target image area.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Tai-Hsiang Huang

  2. Department of Psychology, Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Sciences, and Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Su-Ling Yeh

  3. Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Yung-Hao Yang, Hsin-I Liao, Ya-Yeh Tsai & Pai-Ju Chang

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering, Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, and Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Homer H. Chen

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  1. Tai-Hsiang Huang
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Correspondence to Tai-Hsiang Huang.

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Huang, TH., Yeh, SL., Yang, YH. et al. Method and experiments of subliminal cueing for real-world images. Multimed Tools Appl 74, 10111–10135 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2804-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2804-1

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