Individual differences in visual salience vary along semantic dimensions
Individual differences in visual salience vary along semantic dimensions
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1820553116
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发表时间：
2019-06-11
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Gegenfurtner, Karl R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
de Haas, Benjamin;Iakovidis, Alexios L.;Gegenfurtner, Karl R.
是什么决定了我们看向哪里？注意引导理论认为，图像特征和任务需求控制着注视行为，而观察者之间的差异被解释为“噪音上限”，严格限制了注视的可预测性。然而，最近的双胞胎研究表明，对于给定的刺激，目光轨迹的相似性存在遗传基础。这就引出了一个问题：个体的凝视行为有何不同，以及如何解释这些差异。在这里，我们调查了超过 100 名成年人自由观看包含数千个语义注释对象的大量复杂场景的注视情况。我们发现沿着六个语义刺激维度的注视频率存在系统性个体差异。这些差异很大（>两倍）并且在图像和时间上高度稳定。令人惊讶的是，他们还坚持针对每个图像的第一注视，通常被解释为“自下而上”的视觉显着性。他们的感知相关性是通过个人面部显着性和面部识别技能之间的相关性来记录的。这组可靠的个体显着性维度及其协方差模式在来自三个不同国家的样本中复制，表明它们反映了注意力的基本生物机制。我们的研究结果表明，在一组基本语义维度上，显着性存在稳定的个体差异，并且这些差异具有有意义的感知含义。视觉显着性反映了观察者以及图像的特征。
What determines where we look? Theories of attentional guidance hold that image features and task demands govern fixation behavior, while differences between observers are interpreted as a "noise-ceiling" that strictly limits predictability of fixations. However, recent twin studies suggest a genetic basis of gaze-trace similarity for a given stimulus. This leads to the question of how individuals differ in their gaze behavior and what may explain these differences. Here, we investigated the fixations of >100 human adults freely viewing a large set of complex scenes containing thousands of semantically annotated objects. We found systematic individual differences in fixation frequencies along six semantic stimulus dimensions. These differences were large (>twofold) and highly stable across images and time. Surprisingly, they also held for first fixations directed toward each image, commonly interpreted as "bottom-up" visual salience. Their perceptual relevance was documented by a correlation between individual face salience and face recognition skills. The set of reliable individual salience dimensions and their covariance pattern replicated across samples from three different countries, suggesting they reflect fundamental biological mechanisms of attention. Our findings show stable individual differences in salience along a set of fundamental semantic dimensions and that these differences have meaningful perceptual implications. Visual salience reflects features of the observer as well as the image.