Searching for meaning: Local scene semantics guide attention during natural visual search in scenes

The Representation of Orientation Semantics in Visual Sensory Memory

Visual sensory memory constructs representations of the physical information of visual objects. However, few studies have investigated whether abstract information, such as semantic information, is also involved in these representations. This study utilized a masking technique combined with the partial report paradigm to examine whether visual sensory memory representation contains semantic information. Here, we regarded the concept of orientation carried by the visual stimulus as semantic information. In three experiments, participants were asked to remember the orientation of arrows. Visual stimuli with orientation information (triangles, rectangles, and Chinese characters) and without orientation information (circles, squares, and different Chinese characters) were used as masks. The results showed that memory performance was worse when masks contained orientation information compared to when they did not, as similar orientation semantic information between masks and targets created visual representation conflicts. These findings suggest that visual sensory memory representation includes the semantic information of orientation.

Context matters: The interactive effect of introvert-extrovert personality traits and object valence on object-based attention

Previous research has independently investigated the impact of individual personality traits and object valence on different patterns of attentional selection. However, the interactive role of individual personality traits and object valence in different patterns of attentional selection in both same and different emotional contexts remains unclear. To address the above issues, the present research used a variant of the two-rectangle paradigm, preselected individuals as introverts and extroverts, and simultaneously presented two faces with same or different emotions. Accordance to the result, in the same emotional context, personality traits and object valence did not interact to modulate both space-based effect (SBE) and object-based effect (OBE). However, in the different emotional context, personality traits and object valence interacted to modulate OBE. Specifically, for the extroverts, OBE existed no difference among negative, neutral and positive conditions. In contrast, for the introverts, the OBE was larger in the negative condition compared to those in the positive and neutral conditions. This research provides the first evidence suggesting that object-based attention can be impacted by the interaction between individual characteristics and object properties, and further proposes a preliminary framework called "context-dependent attentional selection hypothesis."

Finding the meaning in meaning maps: Quantifying the roles of semantic and non-semantic scene information in guiding visual attention

In real-world vision, people prioritise the most informative scene regions via eye-movements. According to the cognitive guidance theory of visual attention, viewers allocate visual attention to those parts of the scene that are expected to be the most informative. The expected information of a scene region is coded in the semantic distribution of that scene. Meaning maps have been proposed to capture the spatial distribution of local scene semantics in order to test cognitive guidance theories of attention. Notwithstanding the success of meaning maps, the reason for their success has been contested. This has led to at least two possible explanations for the success of meaning maps in predicting visual attention. On the one hand, meaning maps might measure scene semantics. On the other hand, meaning maps might measure scene features, overlapping with, but distinct from, scene semantics. This study aims to disentangle these two sources of information by considering both conceptual information and non-semantic scene entropy simultaneously. We found that both semantic and non-semantic information is captured by meaning maps, but scene entropy accounted for more unique variance in the success of meaning maps than conceptual information. Additionally, some explained variance was unaccounted for by either source of information. Thus, although meaning maps may index some aspect of semantic information, their success seems to be better explained by non-semantic information. We conclude that meaning maps may not yet be a good tool to test cognitive guidance theories of attention in general, since they capture non-semantic aspects of local semantic density and only a small portion of conceptual information. Rather, we suggest that researchers should better define the exact aspect of cognitive guidance theories they wish to test and then use the tool that best captures that desired semantic information. As it stands, the semantic information contained in meaning maps seems too ambiguous to draw strong conclusions about how and when semantic information guides visual attention.

The role of local meaning in infants' fixations of natural scenes

As infants view visual scenes every day, they must shift their eye gaze and visual attention from location to location, sampling information to process and learn. Like adults, infants' gaze when viewing natural scenes (i.e., photographs of everyday scenes) is influenced by the physical features of the scene image and a general bias to look more centrally in a scene. However, it is unknown how infants' gaze while viewing such scenes is influenced by the semantic content of the scenes. Here, we tested the relative influence of local meaning, controlling for physical salience and center bias, on the eye gaze of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 92) as they viewed natural scenes. Overall, infants were more likely to fixate scene regions rated as higher in meaning, indicating that, like adults, the semantic content, or local meaning, of scenes influences where they look. More importantly, the effect of meaning on infant attention increased with age, providing the first evidence for an age-related increase in the impact of local meaning on infants' eye movements while viewing natural scenes.