Prior knowledge about events depicted in scenes decreases oculomotor exploration

The visual input that the eyes receive usually contains temporally continuous information about unfolding events. Therefore, humans can accumulate knowledge about their current environment. Typical studies on scene perception, however, involve presenting multiple unrelated images and thereby render...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2023-09, Vol.238, p.105544-105544, Article 105544
Main Authors: Pedziwiatr, Marek A., Heer, Sophie, Coutrot, Antoine, Bex, Peter, Mareschal, Isabelle
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognitive science
Eye
Eye Movements
Fixation, Ocular
Humans
Prior knowledge
Scene viewing
Visual Perception
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Summary:The visual input that the eyes receive usually contains temporally continuous information about unfolding events. Therefore, humans can accumulate knowledge about their current environment. Typical studies on scene perception, however, involve presenting multiple unrelated images and thereby render this accumulation unnecessary. Our study, instead, facilitated it and explored its effects. Specifically, we investigated how recently-accumulated prior knowledge affects gaze behavior. Participants viewed sequences of static film frames that contained several ‘context frames’ followed by a ‘critical frame’. The context frames showed either events from which the situation depicted in the critical frame naturally followed, or events unrelated to this situation. Therefore, participants viewed identical critical frames while possessing prior knowledge that was either relevant or irrelevant to the frames' content. In the former case, participants' gaze behavior was slightly more exploratory, as revealed by seven gaze characteristics we analyzed. This result demonstrates that recently-gained prior knowledge reduces exploratory eye movements.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105544