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Behavioral biases when viewing multiplexed scenes: scene structure and frames of reference for inspection.
Matthew J Stainer1, Kenneth C Scott-Brown, Benjamin W Tatler
1Active Vision Lab, School of Psychology, University of Dundee Dundee, UK ; Department of Optometry and Vision Science, University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Frontiers in Psychology
|September 27, 2013
Summary
When viewing scrambled images, people focus on quadrant centers rather than the overall display center. This suggests that disrupting spatial structure causes visual inspection to shift from a single scene to multiple sub-scenes.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Visual Perception
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Eye guidance in scene viewing is influenced by low-level and high-level factors, with a bias towards the image center.
- The increasing prevalence of multiplexed scenes with disrupted structure necessitates understanding gaze behavior in such contexts.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how gaze behavior is organized in multiplexed scenes with disrupted spatial and semantic structure.
- To examine the influence of image scrambling and quadrant separation on visual inspection strategies.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Compared gaze allocation in normally formatted scenes versus scenes with scrambled quadrants and spatial separation.
- Experiment 2: Manipulated the constancy of a specific quadrant (top-left) across conditions with scrambled surrounding quadrants.
Main Results:
- Scrambling scene quadrants significantly influenced gaze allocation, biasing fixations towards quadrant centers.
- While the display center showed an early influence, quadrant centers became dominant anchors for visual inspection in disrupted scenes.
- Observers treated scrambled quadrants as separate sub-scenes, indicating a shift in the frame of reference during viewing.
Conclusions:
- Disrupting the spatial and semantic contiguity of scenes leads observers to anchor visual inspection around quadrant centers.
- The frame of reference for viewing multiplexed scenes shifts from the overall display center to individual quadrant centers over time.
- Gaze behavior adapts to non-standard visual arrangements, prioritizing local features over global scene coherence.
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