Semantic object-scene inconsistencies affect eye movements, but not in the way predicted by contextualized meaning maps

Pedziwiatr, Marek A., Kümmerer, Matthias, Wallis, Thomas S.A., Bethge, Matthias and Teufel, Christoph ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3915-9716 2022. Semantic object-scene inconsistencies affect eye movements, but not in the way predicted by contextualized meaning maps. Journal of Vision 22 (2) , pp. 1-20. 10.1167/jov.22.2.9

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Abstract

Semantic information is important in eye movement control. An important semantic influence on gaze guidance relates to object-scene relationships: objects that are semantically inconsistent with the scene attract more fixations than consistent objects. One interpretation of this effect is that fixations are driven toward inconsistent objects because they are semantically more informative. We tested this explanation using contextualized meaning maps, a method that is based on crowd-sourced ratings to quantify the spatial distribution of context-sensitive “meaning” in images. In Experiment 1, we compared gaze data and contextualized meaning maps for images, in which objects-scene consistency was manipulated. Observers fixated more on inconsistent versus consistent objects. However, contextualized meaning maps did not assign higher meaning to image regions that contained semantic inconsistencies. In Experiment 2, a large number of raters evaluated image-regions, which were deliberately selected for their content and expected meaningfulness. The results suggest that the same scene locations were experienced as slightly less meaningful when they contained inconsistent compared to consistent objects. In summary, we demonstrated that — in the context of our rating task — semantically inconsistent objects are experienced as less meaningful than their consistent counterparts and that contextualized meaning maps do not capture prototypical influences of image meaning on gaze guidance.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)
Additional Information:	Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Publisher:	Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
ISSN:	1534-7362
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 January 2022
Date of Acceptance:	10 January 2022
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 14:49
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/146720

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