Facilitating animacy perception by manipulating relative visual attention

Animacy perception—discriminating between animate and inanimate visual stimuli—is the basis for engaging in social cognition and for our survival (e.g. avoiding potential danger). Previous studies indicate that bottom-up factors, such as the features or motion of a target, enhance animacy perception. However, top-down factors such as elements in perceivers have received little attention. Research on judgment, decision-making, and neuroeconomics indicate the active role of visual attention in constructing decisions. This study examined the role of visual attention in the perception of animacy by manipulating the relative visual attention to targets. Among Studies 1a to 1c conducted in this study, participants saw two face illustrations alternately; one of the faces was shown to be longer than the other. The participants chose the face that they considered more animated and rounder. Consequently, longer visual attention towards targets facilitated animacy perception and preference rather than the perception of roundness. Furthermore, pre-registered Study 2 examined the underlying mechanisms. The results suggest that mere exposure, rather than orienting behaviour, might play a key role in the perception of animacy. These results suggest that in the reverse relationship between attention and animacy perception, animate objects capture attention, and attention results in the perception of animacy.

Eye-Tracker Study of Influence of Affective Disruptive Content on User’s Visual Attention and Emotional State

When reading interesting content or searching for information on a website, the appearance of a pop-up advertisement in the middle of the screen is perceived as irritating by a recipient. Interrupted cognitive processes are considered unwanted by the user but desired by advertising providers. Diverting visual attention away from the main content is intended to focus the user on the appeared disruptive content. Is the attempt to reach the user by any means justified? In this study, we examined the impact of pop-up emotional content on user reactions. For this purpose, a cognitive experiment was designed where a text-reading task was interrupted by two types of affective pictures: positive and negative ones. To measure the changes in user reactions, an eye-tracker (for analysis of eye movements and changes in gaze points) and an iMotion Platform (for analysis of face muscles’ movements) were used. The results confirm the impact of the type of emotional content on users’ reactions during cognitive process interruptions and indicate that the negative impact of cognitive process interruptions on the user can be reduced. The negative content evoked lower cognitive load, narrower visual attention, and lower irritation compared to positive content. These results offer insight on how to provide more efficient Internet advertising.

Visual field inhomogeneous in brain-computer interfaces based on rapid serial visual presentation

Objective. Visual attention is not homogeneous across the visual field, while how to mine the effective EEG characteristics that are sensitive to the inhomogeneous of visual attention and further explore applications such as the performance of brain-computer interface (BCI) are still distressing explorative scientists. Approach. Images were encoded into a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, and were presented in three visuospatial patterns (central, left/right, upper/lower) at the stimulation frequencies of 10Hz, 15Hz and 20Hz. The comparisons among different visual fields were conducted in the dimensions of subjective behavioral and EEG characteristics. Furthermore, the effective features (e.g. SSVEP, N2pc and P300) that sensitive to visual-field asymmetry were also explored. Results. The visual fields had significant influences on the performance of RSVP target detection, in which the performance of central was better than that of peripheral visual field, the performance of horizontal meridian was better than that of vertical meridian, the performance of left visual field was better than that of right visual field, and the performance of upper visual field was better than that of lower visual field. Furthermore, stimuli of different visual fields had significant effects on the spatial distributions of EEG, in which N2pc and P300 showed left-right asymmetry in occipital and frontal regions, respectively. In addition, the evidences of SSVEP characteristics indicated that there was obvious overlap of visual fields on the horizontal meridian, but not on the vertical meridian. Significance. The conclusions of this study provide insights into the relationship between visual field inhomogeneous and EEG characteristics. In addition, this study has the potential to achieve precise positioning of the target's spatial orientation in RSVP-BCIs.

What Is Going on with Visual Attention in Reading and Dyslexia? A Critical Review of Recent Studies

This critical review examined current issues to do with the role of visual attention in reading. To do this, we searched for and reviewed 18 recent articles, including all that were found after 2019 and used a Latin alphabet. Inspection of these articles showed that the Visual Attention Span task was run a number of times in well-controlled studies and was typically a small but significant predictor of reading ability, even after potential covariation with phonological effects were accounted for. A number of other types of tasks were used to examine different aspects of visual attention, with differences between dyslexic readers and controls typically found. However, most of these studies did not adequately control for phonological effects, and of those that did, only very weak and non-significant results were found. Furthermore, in the smaller studies, separate within-group correlations between the tasks and reading performance were generally not provided, making causal effects of the manipulations difficult to ascertain. Overall, it seems reasonable to suggest that understanding how and why different types of visual tasks affect particular aspects of reading performance is an important area for future research.

Do Children With Developmental Language Disorder Activate Scene Knowledge to Guide Visual Attention? Effect of Object-Scene Inconsistencies on Gaze Allocation

Our visual environment is highly predictable in terms of where and in which locations objects can be found. Based on visual experience, children extract rules about visual scene configurations, allowing them to generate scene knowledge. Similarly, children extract the linguistic rules from relatively predictable linguistic contexts. It has been proposed that the capacity of extracting rules from both domains might share some underlying cognitive mechanisms. In the present study, we investigated the link between language and scene knowledge development. To do so, we assessed whether preschool children (age range = 5;4–6;6) with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who present several difficulties in the linguistic domain, are equally attracted to object-scene inconsistencies in a visual free-viewing task in comparison with age-matched children with Typical Language Development (TLD). All children explored visual scenes containing semantic (e.g., soap on a breakfast table), syntactic (e.g., bread on the chair back), or both inconsistencies (e.g., soap on the chair back). Since scene knowledge interacts with image properties (i.e., saliency) to guide gaze allocation during visual exploration from the early stages of development, we also included the objects’ saliency rank in the analysis. The results showed that children with DLD were less attracted to semantic and syntactic inconsistencies than children with TLD. In addition, saliency modulated syntactic effect only in the group of children with TLD. Our findings indicate that children with DLD do not activate scene knowledge to guide visual attention as efficiently as children with TLD, especially at the syntactic level, suggesting a link between scene knowledge and language development.