Domain knowledge moderates the influence of visual saliency in scene recognition

Bibliographic Data

ID9620541
AuthorsKatherine Humphrey (University of Nottingham, corresponding author), Geoffrey Underwood (0000-0001-5697-2106, University of Nottingham)
Year2009
Volume100
Issue2
Pages377-398
Publication date2009-05-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBritish Journal of Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1269 • E-ISSN: 2044-8295
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1348/000712608x344780
PMID18822185
OpenAlexW2118228285
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited33

Is the sequence of eye‐movements made when viewing a picture related to encoding the image into memory? The suggestion of a relationship is supported by studies that have found that scanpaths are more similar over multiple viewings of a stimulus than would be expected by chance. It has also been found that low‐level visual saliency contributes to the initial formation of these scanpaths, and has lead to formation of theories such as the saliency map hypothesis. However, bottom‐up processes such as these can be overridden by top‐down cognitive knowledge in the form of domain proficiency. Domain specialists were asked to look at a set of photographs of real‐world scenes in preparation for a memory test. Then they were given a second set of stimuli and were asked to identify the picture as old (from the previous set) or new (never seen before). Eye tracking analyses (including scanpath comparison using a string editing algorithm) revealed that saliency did influence where participants looked and in what sequence. However, this was reliably reduced when participants viewed pictures from their specialist domain. This effect is shown to be robust in a repeated viewing of the stimuli

Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Domain (mathematical analysis) · Encoding (memory) · Eye movement · Eye tracking · Perception · Sequence (biology) · Set (abstract data type) · Stimulus (psychology) · Visual perception · Artificial Intelligence · Communication · Computer Science · Neuroscience · Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies · Psychology · Visual Attention and Saliency Detection · Visual perception and processing mechanisms

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