Object Frequency and Predictability Effects on Eye Fixation Durations in Real-World Scene Viewing

During text reading, the durations of eye fixations decrease with greater frequency and predictability of the currently fixated word (Rayner, 1998; 2009). However, it has not been tested whether those results also apply to scene viewing. We computed object frequency and predictability from both linguistic and visual scene analysis (LabelMe, Russell et al., 2008), and Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer et al., 1998) was applied to estimate predictability. In a scene-viewing experiment, we found that, for small objects, linguistics-based frequency, but not scene-based frequency, had effects on first fixation duration, gaze duration, and total time. Both linguistic and scene-based predictability affected total time. Similar to reading, fixation duration decreased with higher frequency and predictability. For large objects, we found the direction of effects to be the inverse of those found in reading studies. These results suggest that the recognition of small objects in scene viewing shares some characteristics with the recognition of words in reading.

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