Dataset Information

Eye'll Help You Out! How the Gaze Cue Reduces the Cognitive Load Required for Reference Processing.

ABSTRACT: Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing. We aimed to examine the dynamics of combining visual and linguistic information in creating anticipation for a specific object and the effect this has on language processing. We report evidence from three visual-world eye-tracking experiments, showing that referential gaze leads to a shift in visual attention toward the cued object, which consequently lowers the effort required for processing the linguistic reference. Importantly, perceiving and following the gaze cue did not prove costly in terms of cognitive effort, unless the cued object did not fit the verb selectional preferences.

SUBMITTER: Sekicki M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6585668 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Eye'll Help You Out! How the Gaze Cue Reduces the Cognitive Load Required for Reference Processing.

Sekicki Mirjana M Staudte Maria M

Cognitive science 20181007 8

Referential gaze has been shown to benefit language processing in situated communication in terms of shifting visual attention and leading to shorter reaction times on subsequent tasks. The present study simultaneously assessed both visual attention and, importantly, the immediate cognitive load induced at different stages of sentence processing. We aimed to examine the dynamics of combining visual and linguistic information in creating anticipation for a specific object and the effect this has ...[more]

PMID: 30294808

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Project description:Growing evidence links eye movements and cognitive functioning, however there is debate concerning what image content is fixated in natural scenes. Competing approaches have argued that low-level/feedforward and high-level/feedback factors contribute to gaze-guidance. We used one low-level model (Graph Based Visual Salience, GBVS) and a novel language-based high-level model (Global Vectors for Word Representation, GloVe) to predict gaze locations in a natural image search task, and we examined how fixated locations during this task vary under increasing levels of cognitive load. Participants (N = 30) freely viewed a series of 100 natural scenes for 10 seconds each. Between scenes, subjects identified a target object from the scene a specified number of trials (N) back among three distracter objects of the same type but from alternate scenes. The N-back was adaptive: N-back increased following two correct trials and decreased following one incorrect trial. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis of gaze locations showed that as cognitive load increased, there was a significant increase in prediction power for GBVS, but not for GloVe. Similarly, there was no significant difference in the area under the ROC between the minimum and maximum N-back achieved across subjects for GloVe (t(29) = -1.062, p = 0.297), while there was a cohesive upwards trend for GBVS (t(29) = -1.975, p = .058), although not significant. A permutation analysis showed that gaze locations were correlated with GBVS indicating that salient features were more likely to be fixated. However, gaze locations were anti-correlated with GloVe, indicating that objects with low semantic consistency with the scene were more likely to be fixated. These results suggest that fixations are drawn towards salient low-level image features and this bias increases with cognitive load. Additionally, there is a bias towards fixating improbable objects that does not vary under increasing levels of cognitive load.

Dataset Information

Eye'll Help You Out! How the Gaze Cue Reduces the Cognitive Load Required for Reference Processing.

Publications

Eye'll Help You Out! How the Gaze Cue Reduces the Cognitive Load Required for Reference Processing.

Similar Datasets

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