Abstract
How does visual saliency determine the attention given to objects in a scene, and is the detection of change dependent upon the conspicuity of the changed object? Viewers’ eye movements were recorded during the inspection of pictures of natural scenes. Two versions of a scene were compared to determine whether or not they were the same. The two images were either available at the same time (Experiment 1), or consecutively (Experiment 2). When an object was changed, it either had high or low visual saliency and it either was congruent with the scene or it violated the gist in that it would not be expected to be seen in that context. Previous studies have indicated that incongruous objects sometimes attract early attention, but the inconsistency of this effect leads to the question of whether it is dependent upon conspicuity rather than congruity. Incongruous objects attract early eye fixations here, dismissing the explanation based on visual saliency.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Biederman, I.: Perceiving real-world scenes. Sci. 177, 77–80 (1972)
Biederman, I., Glass, A.L., Stacy, E.W.: On the information extracted from a glance at a scene. J. Exp. Psychol. 103, 597–600 (1973)
Biederman, I., Rabinowitz, J.C., Glass, A.L., Stacy, E.W.: On the information extracted from a glance at a scene. J. Exp. Psychol. 103, 597–600 (1974)
Davenport, J.L., Potter, M.C.: Scene consistency in object and background perception. Psychol. Sci. 15, 559–564 (2004)
Biederman, I., Mezzanotte, R.J., Rabinowitz, J.C.: Scene perception: Detecting and judging objects undergoing relational violations. Cog. Psychol. 14, 143–177 (1982)
Mackworth, N.H., Morandi, A.J.: The gaze selects informative details within pictures. Perc. Psychophys. 2, 547–552 (1967)
Loftus, G.R., Mackworth, N.H.: Cognitive determinants of fixation location during picture viewing. J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Perc. Perf. 4, 565–572 (1978)
De Graef, P., Christiaens, D., d’Ydewalle, G.: Perceptual effects of scene context on object identification. Psychol. Res. 52, 317–329 (1990)
Henderson, J.M., Weeks, P.A., Hollingworth, A.: The effects of semantic consistency on eye movements during complex scene viewing. J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Perc. Perf. 25, 210–228 (1999)
Itti, L., Koch, C.: A saliency-based search mechanism for overt and covert shifts of visual attention. Vis. Res. 40, 1489–1506 (2000)
Itti, L.: Quantitative modelling of perceptual salience at human eye position. Vis. Cog. 14, 959–984 (2006)
Parkhurst, D., Law, K., Niebur, E.: Modeling the role of salience in the allocation of overt visual attention. Vis. Res. 42, 107–123 (2002)
Underwood, G., Foulsham, T., van Loon, E., Underwood, J.: Visual attention, visual saliency, and eye movements during the inspection of natural scenes. In: Mira, J., Álvarez, J.R. (eds.) IWINAC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3562, pp. 459–468. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Underwood, G., Foulsham, T.: Visual saliency and semantic incongruency influence eye movements when inspecting pictures. Quart. J. Exp. Psychol. 59, 1931–1949 (2006)
Pomplun, M., Reingold, E.M., Shen, J.: Investigating the visual span in comparative search: the effects of task difficulty and divided attention. Cog. 81, 57–67 (2001)
Pomplun, M., Sichelschmidt, L., Wagner, K., Clermont, T., Rickheit, G., Ritter, H.: Comparative visual search: A difference that makes a difference. Cog. Sci. 25, 3–36 (2001)
Galpin, A.J., Underwood, G.: Eye movements during search and detection in comparative visual search. Perc. Psychophys. 67, 1313–1331 (2005)
Rensink, R.A.: To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychol. Sci. 8, 368–373 (1997)
O’Regan, J.K., Rensink, R.A., Clark, J.J.: Change-blindness as a result of ‘mudsplashes’. Nature 398, 334 (1999)
Stirk, J.A., Underwood, G.: Low-level visual saliency does not predict change detection in natural scenes. J. Vis. 7(10):3, 1–10 (2007)
Rensink, R.A.: The dynamic representation of scenes. Vis. Cog. 7, 17–42 (2000)
Hollingworth, A., Henderson, J.M.: Accurate visual memory for previously attended objects in natural scenes. J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Perc. Perf. 28, 113–136 (2002)
Hollingworth, A.: The relationship between online visual representation of a scene and long-term scene memory. J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cog. 31, 396–411 (2005)
O’Regan, J.K.: Solving the ‘’real” mysteries of visual perception: The world as an outside memory. Canad. J. Psychol. 46, 461–488 (1992)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Underwood, J., Templeman, E., Underwood, G. (2009). Conspicuity and Congruity in Change Detection. In: Paletta, L., Tsotsos, J.K. (eds) Attention in Cognitive Systems. WAPCV 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5395. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00582-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00582-4_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00581-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00582-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)