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Fixations on objects in natural scenes: dissociating importance from salience
Bernard M 't Hart1, Hannah C E F Schmidt, Christine Roth
1Neurophysics, Philipps-University Marburg Marburg, Germany ; Physiological Genomics, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany.
Frontiers in Psychology
|July 25, 2013
Summary
Object importance, not just contrast, influences where people look in natural scenes. Manipulating contrast affects attention, but object relevance to the scene is key for guiding gaze.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Computational neuroscience
- Computer vision
Background:
- Gaze is a common proxy for selective attention in understanding natural scenes.
- Image region fixation often correlates with contrast, but causality is unclear.
- Object importance may drive attention, rather than contrast alone.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between object importance and visual attention in natural scenes.
- To determine if contrast or object importance primarily drives fixation probability.
- To explore how manipulating contrast affects object importance and salience.
Main Methods:
- Modified luminance contrast of "important" (frequently named) and "unimportant" (rarely named) objects in scenes.
- Tracked observer eye movements during scene viewing.
- Collected scene keywords from observers post-viewing.
Main Results:
- Important objects received more fixations than unimportant ones when contrast was unmodified.
- Increased contrast increased fixation probability for any object, regardless of original importance.
- Decreased contrast had minimal effect on fixations; contrast modification increased the perceived importance of unimportant objects.
- Important objects were fixated more centrally, irrespective of contrast.
- A dissociation between object importance and salience was observed when natural scene statistics were violated.
Conclusions:
- Object importance (scene relevance) and salience (attentional relevance) are distinct.
- Natural scene statistics link importance and salience, but violations decouple them.
- Salience is influenced by expectations, while importance is affected by expectation violations.
- Fixation patterns within objects relate to their importance, analogous to reading behavior.
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