ArticleAttention, perception & psychophysics2019
Meaning guides attention during scene viewing, even when it is irrelevant.
Article in Attention, perception & psychophysics, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 34 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- The role of event understanding in guiding attentional selection in real-world scenes: The Scene Perception & Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT).Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Review
- Task irrelevant sounds influence visual attention through graded crossmodal semantic modulation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Eye movements during free viewing to maximize scene understanding.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Anchor objects guide spatial attention during visual search.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- What have we learned about infant visual attention in the first 25 years of the 21st century?Infant behavior & development · 2025Review
- Ageing modulates the effects of scene complexity on visual search and target selection in virtual environments.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Object spatial certainty as a measure of spatial variability and its influence on attention.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Effective connectivity between the medial temporal lobes and early visual cortex modulated by unrestricted viewing predicts memory retrieval and gaze reinstatement.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Exploring cross-modal perception in a virtual classroom: the effect of visual stimuli on auditory selective attention.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Task-irrelevant semantic relationship between objects and scene influence attentional allocation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Objects are selected for attention based upon meaning during passive scene viewing.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Influence of figure information on attention distribution in Chinese landscape painting.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Searching for meaning: Local scene semantics guide attention during natural visual search in scenes.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Article
- Visual attention during seeing for speaking in healthy aging.Psychology and aging · 2023Article
- Speakers prioritise affordance-based object semantics in scene descriptions.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2023Article
- Look at what I can do: Object affordances guide visual attention while speakers describe potential actions.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Article
- Rapid Extraction of the Spatial Distribution of Physical Saliency and Semantic Informativeness from Natural Scenes in the Human Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Gaze dynamics are sensitive to target orienting for working memory encoding in virtual reality.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- The past, present, and future of selection history.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- Meaning and expected surfaces combine to guide attention during visual search in scenes.Journal of vision · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
During real-world scene viewing, humans must prioritize scene regions for attention. What are the roles of low-level image salience and high-level semantic meaning in attentional prioritization? A previous study suggested that when salience and meaning are directly contrasted in scene memorization and preference tasks, attentional priority is assigned by meaning (Henderson & Hayes in Nature Human Behavior, 1, 743-747, 2017). Here we examined the role of meaning in attentional guidance using two tasks in which meaning was irrelevant and salience was relevant: a brightness rating task and a brightness search task. Meaning was represented by meaning maps that captured the spatial distribution of semantic features. Meaning was contrasted with image salience, represented by saliency maps. Critically, both maps were represented similarly, allowing us to directly compare how meaning and salience influenced the spatial distribution of attention, as measured by fixation density maps. Our findings suggest that even in tasks for which meaning is irrelevant and salience is relevant, meaningful scene regions are prioritized for attention over salient scene regions. These results support theories in which scene semantics play a dominant role in attentional guidance in scenes.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.