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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Published on: November 30, 2018

Implicitly perceived objects attract gaze during later free viewing.

Yoni Pertzov¹, Ehud Zohary, Galia Avidan

¹The Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. pertzov@gmail.com

Journal of Vision

|September 19, 2009

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Visual search is guided by both explicit target templates and implicit perceptual cues. Unrecognized objects, but not subliminal words, automatically draw attention during visual search tasks.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Visual Perception

Background:

Everyday tasks involve frequent visual search, guided by eye movements.
Current visual search models emphasize target templates guiding gaze to similar locations.
The influence of implicit, unrecognized cues on visual search remains an area of investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the influence of implicit cues on visual search scanning patterns.
To differentiate the effects of perceptual versus semantic implicit information on visual search.
To refine existing models of visual search by incorporating unconscious guidance mechanisms.

Main Methods:

Participants performed visual search tasks with varying implicit cues.
Backward masking was used to present unrecognized objects before scene display.
Subliminal presentation of object-related words was employed as a control condition.
Eye-tracking technology recorded participants' scanning patterns and gaze behavior.

Main Results:

Backward masked objects, presented subliminally, automatically attracted gaze to their location in the subsequent scene.
Subliminally presented words related to objects did not significantly influence scanning patterns.
Visual search is unconsciously guided by activated target representations at the perceptual level.

Conclusions:

Implicit perceptual cues, like masked objects, significantly influence visual search guidance.
Implicit semantic information, conveyed through subliminal words, has a weaker effect on visual search.
Findings suggest that visual search models should account for unconscious guidance from perceptual representations.