Don't look now! Social elements are harder to avoid during scene viewing

Vision Res. 2024 Jan 6;216:108356. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2023.108356. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTRegions of social importance (i.e., other people) attract attention in real world scenes, but it is unclear how automatic this bias is and how it might interact with other guidance factors. To investigate this, we recorded eye movements while participants were explicitly instructed to avoid looking at one of two objects in a scene (either a person or a non-social object). The results showed that, while participants could follow these instructions, they still made errors (especially on the first saccade). Crucially, there were about twice as many erroneous looks towards the person than there were towards the other object. This indicates that it is hard to suppress the prioritization of social information during scene viewing, with implications for how quickly and automatically this information is perceived and attended to.PMID:38184917 | DOI:10.1016/j.visres.2023.108356

Source: Vision Research - January 7, 2024 Category: Opthalmology Authors: A P Martinez-Cedillo T Foulsham Source Type: research