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Visual and emotional salience influence eye movements

Published: 02 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

In natural vision both stimulus features and cognitive/affective factors influence an observer's attention. However, the relationship between stimulus-driven (bottom-up) and cognitive/affective (top-down) factors remains controversial: How well does the classic visual salience model account for gaze locations? Can emotional salience counteract strong visual stimulus signals and shift attention allocation irrespective of bottom-up features? Here we compared Itti and Koch's [2000] and Spectral Residual (SR) visual salience model and explored the impact of visual salience and emotional salience on eye movement behavior, to understand the competition between visual salience and emotional salience and how they affect gaze allocation in complex scenes viewing. Our results show the insufficiency of visual salience models in predicting fixation. Emotional salience can override visual salience and can determine attention allocation in complex scenes. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive/affective factors play a dominant role in active gaze control.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception  Volume 9, Issue 3
July 2012
74 pages
ISSN:1544-3558
EISSN:1544-3965
DOI:10.1145/2325722
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 02 August 2012
Accepted: 01 June 2012
Received: 01 May 2012
Published in TAP Volume 9, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Emotional salience
  2. attention
  3. bottom-up
  4. eye movements
  5. top-down
  6. visual salience

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