Title:	Global visual salience of competing stimuli
Authors:	Hernández-García, Alex Gameiro, Ricardo Ramos Grillini, Alessandro König, Peter
ORCID of the author:	https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5473-4507 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3654-5267
Abstract:	Current computational models of visual salience accurately predict the distribution of fixations on isolated visual stimuli. It is not known, however, whether the global salience of a stimulus, that is, its effectiveness in the competition for attention with other stimuli, is a function of the local salience or an independent measure. Further, do task and familiarity with the competing images influence eye movements? Here, we investigated the direction of the first saccade to characterize and analyze the global visual salience of competing stimuli. Participants freely observed pairs of images while eye movements were recorded. The pairs balanced the combinations of new and already seen images, as well as task and task-free trials. Then, we trained a logistic regression model that accurately predicted the location—left or right image—of the first fixation for each stimulus pair, accounting too for the influence of task, familiarity, and lateral bias. The coefficients of the model provided a reliable measure of global salience, which we contrasted with two distinct local salience models, GBVS and Deep Gaze. The lack of correlation of the behavioral data with the former and the small correlation with the latter indicate that global salience cannot be explained by the feature-driven local salience of images. Further, the influence of task and familiarity was rather small, and we reproduced the previously reported left-sided bias. Summarized, we showed that natural stimuli have an intrinsic global salience related to the human initial gaze direction, independent of the local salience and little influenced by task and familiarity.
Citations:	Alex Hernández-García, Ricardo Ramos Gameiro, Alessandro Grillini, Peter König: Global visual salience of competing stimuli. Journal of Vision 2020;20(7):27.
URL:	https://osnadocs.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-202105184696
Subject Keywords:	image salience; visual behavior; overt attention; spatial exploration
Issue Date:	28-Jul-2020
License name:	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License url:	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Type of publication:	Einzelbeitrag in einer wissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift [article]
Appears in Collections:	FB08 - Hochschulschriften Open-Access-Publikationsfonds

This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License