scholarly journals The effects of social and symbolic cues on visual search: Cue shape trumps biological relevance

Psihologija ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frouke Hermens

Arrow signs are often used in crowded environments such as airports to direct observers? attention to objects and areas of interest. Research with social and symbolic cues presented in isolation at fixation has suggested that social cues (such as eye gaze and pointing hands) are more effective in directing observers? attention than symbolic cues. The present work examines whether in visual search, social cues would therefore be more effective than arrows, by asking participants to locate target objects in crowded displays that were cued by eye-gaze, pointing hands or arrow cues. Results show an advantage for arrow cues, but only for arrow cues that stand out from the surroundings. The results confirm earlier suggestions that in extrafoveal vision cue shape trumps biological relevance. Eye movements suggest that these cueing effects rely predominantly on extrafoveal perception of the cues.

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Henriksson ◽  
Riitta Hari

AbstractA framework where only the size of the functional visual field of fixations can vary is hardly able to explain natural visual-search behavior. In real-world search tasks, context guides eye movements, and task-irrelevant social stimuli may capture the gaze.


2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew P. Bayliss ◽  
Giuseppe di Pellegrino ◽  
Steven P. Tipper

Observing a face with averted eyes results in a reflexive shift of attention to the gazed-at location. Here we present results that show that this effect is weaker in males than in females (Experiment 1). This result is predicted by the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism (Baron-Cohen, 2003), which suggests that males in the normal population should display more autism-like traits than females (e.g., poor joint attention). Indeed, participants′ scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stott, Bolton, & Goodyear, 2001) negatively correlated with cueing magnitude. Furthermore, exogenous orienting did not differ between the sexes in two peripheral cueing experiments (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, a final experiment showed that using non-predictive arrows instead of eyes as a central cue also revealed a large gender difference. This demonstrates that reduced orienting from central cues in males generalizes beyond gaze cues. These results show that while peripheral cueing is equivalent in the male and female brains, the attention systems of the two sexes treat noninformative symbolic cues very differently.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (9) ◽  
pp. 1860-1872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen RH Langton ◽  
Alex H McIntyre ◽  
Peter JB Hancock ◽  
Helmut Leder

Research has established that a perceived eye gaze produces a concomitant shift in a viewer’s spatial attention in the direction of that gaze. The two experiments reported here investigate the extent to which the nature of the eye movement made by the gazer contributes to this orienting effect. On each trial in these experiments, participants were asked to make a speeded response to a target that could appear in a location toward which a centrally presented face had just gazed (a cued target) or in a location that was not the recipient of a gaze (an uncued target). The gaze cues consisted of either fast saccadic eye movements or slower smooth pursuit movements. Cued targets were responded to faster than uncued targets, and this gaze-cued orienting effect was found to be equivalent for each type of gaze shift both when the gazes were un-predictive of target location (Experiment 1) and counterpredictive of target location (Experiment 2). The results offer no support for the hypothesis that motion speed modulates gaze-cued orienting. However, they do suggest that motion of the eyes per se, regardless of the type of movement, may be sufficient to trigger an orienting effect.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (10) ◽  
pp. 26b
Author(s):  
Ilmari Kurki ◽  
Miguel P Eckstein

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1323-1323
Author(s):  
C. Williams ◽  
A. Pollatsek ◽  
E. Reichle

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Ramey ◽  
Andrew P. Yonelinas ◽  
John M. Henderson

A hotly debated question is whether memory influences attention through conscious or unconscious processes. To address this controversy, we measured eye movements while participants searched repeated real-world scenes for embedded targets, and we assessed memory for each scene using confidence-based methods to isolate different states of subjective memory awareness. We found that memory-informed eye movements during visual search were predicted both by conscious recollection, which led to a highly precise first eye movement toward the remembered location, and by unconscious memory, which increased search efficiency by gradually directing the eyes toward the target throughout the search trial. In contrast, these eye movement measures were not influenced by familiarity-based memory (i.e., changes in subjective reports of memory strength). The results indicate that conscious recollection and unconscious memory can each play distinct and complementary roles in guiding attention to facilitate efficient extraction of visual information.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
Selene Cansino

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention on episodic memory. Thirty healthy participants performed a cueing attention paradigm during encoding, in which images of common objects were presented either to the left or to the right of the center of the screen. Before the presentation of each image, three types of symbolic cues were displayed to indicate the location in which the stimuli would appear: valid cues to elicit endogenous orientation, invalid cues to prompt exogenous orientation and neutral or uncued trials. The participants’ task was to discriminate whether the images were symmetrical or not while fixating on the center of the screen to assure the manifestation of only covert attention mechanisms. Covert attention refers to the ability to orient attention by means of central control mechanisms alone, without head and eye movements. Trials with eye movements were excluded after inspection of eye-tracker recordings that were conducted throughout the task. During retrieval, participants conducted a source memory task in which they indicated the location where the images were presented during encoding. Memory for spatial context was superior during endogenous orientation than during exogenous orientation, whereas exogenous orientation was associated with a greater number of missed responses compared to the neutral trials. The formation of episodic memory representations with contextual details benefits from endogenous attention.


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