Novelty biases attention and gaze in a surprise trial (original) (raw)
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Perceptual salience captures the eyes on a surprise trial
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2016
A number of characteristics of the visual system and of the visual stimulus are invoked to explain involuntary control of attention, including goals, novelty, and perceptual salience. The present experiment tested perceptual salience on a surprise trial, that is, on its unannounced first presentation following trials lacking any salient items, thus eliminating possible confounds by current goals. Moreover, the salient item's location was not singled out by a novel feature, thus eliminating a possible confound by novelty in directing attention. Eye tracking was used to measure involuntary attention. Results show a prioritization of the salient item. However, contrary to predictions of prominent neuro-computational and psychological salience models, prioritization was not fast-acting. Rather the observers' gaze was attracted only as the second fixation on average or later (depending on condition) and with a latency of more than 500 ms on average. These results support the general proposition that salience can control attention. However, contrary to most salience models, the present results indicate that salience changes attentional priority only in novel environments.
Surprise attracts the eyes and binds the gaze
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2014
In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the effects that deviations from expectations have on cognitive processing and, in particular, on the deployment of attention. Previous evidence for a surprise-attention link had been based on indirect measures of attention allocation. Here we used eyetracking to directly observe the impact of a novel color on its unannounced first presentation, which we regarded as a surprise condition. The results show that the novel color was quickly responded to with an eye movement, and that gaze was not turned away for a considerable amount of time. These results are direct evidence that deviations from expectations bias attentional priorities and lead to enhanced processing of the deviating stimulus.
Surprise? Early visual novelty processing is not modulated by attention
Psychophysiology, 2011
This study investigated the influence of direction of attention on the early detection of visual novelty, as indexed by the anterior N2. The anterior N2 was measured in young subjects (n=32) under an Attend and Ignore condition. Subjects were presented standard, target/rare, and perceptually novel visual stimuli under both conditions, but under the Ignore condition, attention was directed towards an auditory n-back task. The size of the anterior N2 to novel stimuli did not differ between conditions and was significantly larger than the anterior N2 to all other stimulus types. Furthermore, under the Ignore condition, the anterior N2 to visual novel stimuli was not affected by the level of difficulty of the auditory n-back task (3-back vs. 2-back). Our findings suggest that the early processing of visual novelty, as measured by the size of the anterior N2, is not strongly modulated by direction of attention.
Surprise capture and inattentional blindness
Cognition, 2016
Inattentional blindness (IB) is the phenomenon where unattended objects are not noticed. IB is typically tested within a surprise presentation procedure: A novel object is presented on a critical trial for the first time without prior announcement. Previous research indicates that IB is high unless the novel object is (a) similar to the target of the present task or (b) perceptually salient. The present study seeks evidence that the expectancy congruence of the novel object is a further important determinant of IB, and that the novel object is frequently noticed if it has a feature that is expectancy discrepant. An influence of perceptual saliency is excluded by presenting only two objects in each display. Experiment 1 reveals that an expectancy discrepant novel feature is noticed even if it is completely dissimilar to the target. Experiment 2 shows that expectancy discrepancy and match to target features can prioritize an object at the same time. Experiment 3 shows that IB is relat...
Previously seen and expected stimuli elicit surprise in the context of visual search
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2016
In the context of visual search, surprise is the phenomenon by which a previously unseen and unexpected stimulus exogenously attracts spatial attention. Capture by such a stimulus occurs, by definition, independent of task goals and is thought to be dependent on the extent to which the stimulus deviates from expectations. However, the relative contributions of prior-exposure and explicit knowledge of an unexpected event to the surprise response have not yet been systematically investigated. Here observers searched for a specific color while ignoring irrelevant cues of different colors presented prior to the target display. After a brief familiarization period, we presented an irrelevant motion cue to elicit surprise. Across conditions we varied prior exposure to the motion stimulusseen versus unseenand top-down expectations of occurrenceexpected versus unexpectedto assess the extent to which each of these factors contributes to surprise. We found no attenuation of the surprise response when observers were pre-exposed to the motion cue and or had explicit knowledge of its occurrence. Our results show that it is neither sufficient nor necessary that a stimulus be new and unannounced to elicit surprise and suggest that the expectations that determine the surprise response are highly context specific.
Eye movements and visual search in novel and familiar contexts
Journal of Vision, 2005
Adapting to the visual characteristics of a specific environment may facilitate detecting novel stimuli within that environment. We monitored eye movements while subjects searched for a color target on familiar or unfamiliar color backgrounds, in order to test for these performance changes and to explore whether they reflect changes in salience from adaptation vs. changes in search strategies or perceptual learning. The target was an ellipse of variable color presented at a random location on a dense background of ellipses. In one condition, the colors of the background varied along either the LvsM or SvsLM cardinal axes. Observers adapted by viewing a rapid succession of backgrounds drawn from one color axis, and then searched for a target on a background from the same or different color axis. Searches were monitored with a Cambridge Research Systems Video Eyetracker. Targets were located more quickly on the background axis that observers were pre-exposed to, confirming that this exposure can improve search efficiency for stimuli that differ from the background. However, eye movement patterns (e.g. fixation durations and saccade magnitudes) did not clearly differ across the two backgrounds, suggesting that how the novel and familiar backgrounds were sampled remained similar. In a second condition, we compared search on a nonselective color background drawn from a circle of hues at fixed contrast. Prior exposure to this background did not facilitate search compared to an achromatic adapting field, suggesting that subjects were not simply learning the specific colors defining the background distributions. Instead, results for both conditions are consistent with a selective adaptation effect that enhances the salience of novel stimuli by partially discounting the background.
The surprise-attention link: a review
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2015
The surprise-attention hypothesis assumes a strong connection between surprise-expectancy discrepant events-and attention. Attention is easily engaged with surprising events, leading to long dwell times. In addition, if the expectancy discrepancy can be determined on the basis of simple, preattentively available information, attention can be captured by the surprising stimulus. This review summarizes different lines of research relevant to the proposed surprise-attention link: shifts of attention as indexed by accuracy gains and efficiency gains, validity effects, shifts of gaze, discrepancies in natural scenes, surprise-induced blindness, and action interruption. It is argued that there is convergent evidence for the surprise-attention link in general, and for the particular hypothesis that the underlying mechanism constantly tests expectancies on different levels of representation. Evidence also converges on a latency of an attentional engagement of nearly 400 ms. This seems to be...
Consciousness and Cognition, 2008
Eye movements were recorded during the display of two images of a real-world scene that were inspected to determine whether they were the same or not (a comparative visual search task). In the displays where the pictures were different, one object had been changed, and this object was sometimes taken from another scene and was incongruent with the gist. The experiment established that incongruous objects attract eye fixations earlier than the congruous counterparts, but that this effect is not apparent until the picture has been displayed for several seconds. By controlling the visual saliency of the objects the experiment eliminates the possibility that the incongruency effect is dependent upon the conspicuity of the changed objects. A model of scene perception is suggested whereby attention is unnecessary for the partial recognition of an object that delivers sufficient information about its visual characteristics for the viewer to know that the object is improbable in that particular scene, and in which full identification requires foveal inspection.
The Time Course of Color- and Luminance-Based Salience Effects
Frontiers in Psychology, 2010
Salient objects in the visual field attract our attention. Recent work in the orientation domain has shown that the effects of the relative salience of two singleton elements on covert visual attention disappear over time. The present study aims to investigate how salience derived from color and luminance differences affects covert selection. In two experiments, observers indicated the location of a probe which was presented at different stimulus-onset-asynchronies after the presentation of a singleton display containing a homogenous array of oriented lines and two distinct color singletons (Experiment 1) or luminance singletons (Experiment 2). The results show that relative singleton salience from luminance and color differences, just as from orientation differences, affects covert visual attention in a brief time span after stimulus onset. The mere presence of an object, however, can affect covert attention for a longer time span regardless of salience.