“Eyes Closed” and “Eyes Open” Expectations Guide Fixations in Real-World Search
Tom Foulsham · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2012
Investigations of search within realistic scenes have identified both bottom-up and top-down influences on performance.Here, I describe two types of top-down expectations that might guide observers looking for objects.Initially, likely locations can be predicted based only on the target identity but without any visual information from the scene ("Eyes closed").When a visual preview becomes available, a more refined prediction can be made based on scene layout ("Eyes open").In two experiments participants guessed the location of a target with or without a brief preview of the scene.Responses were consistent between observers and were used to predict the eye movements of new observers in a third experiment.The results confirm that participants use both types of top-down cues during search, and provide a simple method for estimating these expectations in predictive models.