Look at what I can do: Object affordances guide visual attention while speakers describe potential actions

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Overt visual attention selects objects for potential interaction.
• Previous research highlighted grasping affordances and general informativeness, potentially underestimating broader object affordances.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate how object affordances and semantic information influence visual attention during scene description and memorization.
• Determine if task demands modulate the impact of affordances on attention.

Main Methods:

• Conducted 5 eyetracking experiments analyzing overt visual attention.
• Utilized meaning maps (informativeness), grasp maps (grasping affordances), and novel interact maps (broader affordances).
• Employed mixed-effects modeling to analyze fixation patterns.

Main Results:

• Meaning maps predicted attention in general description and memorization tasks.
• Interact maps predicted attention during scene description tasks.
• Grasp maps showed a marginal effect in action descriptions within reachable spaces.

Conclusions:

• Visual attention is drawn to interactable objects when describing scenes, indicating task-specific affordance influence.
• General informativeness guides attention when detailed object consideration is not required.
• Task demands are a key mediator of how object affordances affect visual attention in scenes.