Research Article Effects of Salience Are Short-Lived
ABSTRACT—A salient event in the visual field tends to at-tract attention and the eyes. To account... more ABSTRACT—A salient event in the visual field tends to at-tract attention and the eyes. To account for the effects of salience on visual selection, models generally assume that the human visual system continuously holds information concerning the relative salience of objects in the visual field. Here we show that salience in fact drives vision only during the short time interval immediately following the onset of a visual scene. In a saccadic target-selection task, human performance in making an eye movement to the most salient element in a display was accurate when re-sponse latencies were short, but was at chance when re-sponse latencies were long. In a manual discrimination task, performance in making a judgment of salience was more accurate with brief than with long display dura-tions. These results suggest that salience is represented in the visual system only briefly after a visual image enters the brain. A salient object tends to attract attention and often initiates a subsequ...
Target-distractor competition cannot be resolved across a saccade
Scientific reports, Jan 24, 2018
When a distractor is presented in close spatial proximity to a target, a saccade tends to land in... more When a distractor is presented in close spatial proximity to a target, a saccade tends to land in between the two objects rather than on the target. This robust phenomenon (also referred to as the global effect) is thought to reflect unresolved competition between target and distractor. It is unclear whether this landing bias persists across saccades since a saccade displaces the retinotopic representations of target and distractor. In the present study participants made successive saccades towards two saccadic targets which were presented simultaneously with an irrelevant distractor in close proximity to the second saccade target. The second saccade was either visually-guided or memory-guided. For the memory-guided trials, the second saccade showed a landing bias towards the location of the distractor, despite the disappearance of the distractor after the first saccade. In contrast, for the visually-guided trials, the bias was corrected and the landing bias was eliminated, even for...
Salient object changes influence overt attentional prioritization and object-based targeting in natural scenes
PloS one, 2017
A change to an object in natural scenes attracts attention when it occurs during a fixation. Howe... more A change to an object in natural scenes attracts attention when it occurs during a fixation. However, when a change occurs during a saccade, and is masked by saccadic suppression, it typically does not capture the gaze in a bottom-up manner. In the present work, we investigated how the type and direction of salient changes to objects affect the prioritization and targeting of objects in natural scenes. We asked observers to look around a scene in preparation for a later memory test. After a period of time, an object in the scene was increased or decreased in salience either during a fixation (with a transient signal) or during a saccade (without transient signal), or it was not changed at all. Changes that were made during a fixation attracted the eyes both when the change involved an increase and a decrease in salience. However, changes that were made during a saccade only captured the eyes when the change was an increase in salience, relative to the baseline no-change condition. T...
Research Article Effects of Salience Are Short-Lived
ABSTRACT—A salient event in the visual field tends to at-tract attention and the eyes. To account... more ABSTRACT—A salient event in the visual field tends to at-tract attention and the eyes. To account for the effects of salience on visual selection, models generally assume that the human visual system continuously holds information concerning the relative salience of objects in the visual field. Here we show that salience in fact drives vision only during the short time interval immediately following the onset of a visual scene. In a saccadic target-selection task, human performance in making an eye movement to the most salient element in a display was accurate when re-sponse latencies were short, but was at chance when re-sponse latencies were long. In a manual discrimination task, performance in making a judgment of salience was more accurate with brief than with long display dura-tions. These results suggest that salience is represented in the visual system only briefly after a visual image enters the brain. A salient object tends to attract attention and often initiates a subsequ...
Target-distractor competition cannot be resolved across a saccade
Scientific reports, Jan 24, 2018
When a distractor is presented in close spatial proximity to a target, a saccade tends to land in... more When a distractor is presented in close spatial proximity to a target, a saccade tends to land in between the two objects rather than on the target. This robust phenomenon (also referred to as the global effect) is thought to reflect unresolved competition between target and distractor. It is unclear whether this landing bias persists across saccades since a saccade displaces the retinotopic representations of target and distractor. In the present study participants made successive saccades towards two saccadic targets which were presented simultaneously with an irrelevant distractor in close proximity to the second saccade target. The second saccade was either visually-guided or memory-guided. For the memory-guided trials, the second saccade showed a landing bias towards the location of the distractor, despite the disappearance of the distractor after the first saccade. In contrast, for the visually-guided trials, the bias was corrected and the landing bias was eliminated, even for...
Salient object changes influence overt attentional prioritization and object-based targeting in natural scenes
PloS one, 2017
A change to an object in natural scenes attracts attention when it occurs during a fixation. Howe... more A change to an object in natural scenes attracts attention when it occurs during a fixation. However, when a change occurs during a saccade, and is masked by saccadic suppression, it typically does not capture the gaze in a bottom-up manner. In the present work, we investigated how the type and direction of salient changes to objects affect the prioritization and targeting of objects in natural scenes. We asked observers to look around a scene in preparation for a later memory test. After a period of time, an object in the scene was increased or decreased in salience either during a fixation (with a transient signal) or during a saccade (without transient signal), or it was not changed at all. Changes that were made during a fixation attracted the eyes both when the change involved an increase and a decrease in salience. However, changes that were made during a saccade only captured the eyes when the change was an increase in salience, relative to the baseline no-change condition. T...
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Papers by Mieke Donk