Pre-viewing context and visual attention in museum scenes: an exploratory eye-tracking study.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Museum Studies

Background:

• Visual attention is influenced by both image features and pre-viewing context.
• The impact of different context formats on attention in curated visual scenes is not well understood.
• Evaluation metrics can affect findings on attention allocation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how different pre-viewing context formats affect visual attention in museum-oriented scenes.
• To explore the relationship between context, image saliency, and attention patterns.
• To develop a metric-aware approach for analyzing context-associated attention differences.

Main Methods:

• An exploratory free-viewing eye-tracking study was conducted.
• Participants viewed museum scene keyframes after receiving brief pre-viewing context in various formats.
• Gaze data from 10 participants across 30 images were analyzed against saliency models.

Main Results:

• Systematic differences in gaze-reference correspondence and variability were observed based on context.
• Pre-viewing context demonstrably influences the concentration of visual attention.
• Different evaluation metrics highlighted distinct aspects of attention deviation.

Conclusions:

• Pre-viewing context plays a crucial role in shaping visual attention within interpretive settings.
• A metric-aware approach can effectively report context-associated attention differences, even in small datasets.
• Findings can inform the design of interpretive displays using textual and graphical cues to guide viewer attention.