Martinez Cedillo, Astrid and Dent, Kevin and Foulsham, Tom (2023) Social prioritisation in scene viewing and the effects of a spatial memory load. Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, 86 (4). pp. 1237-1247. DOI https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02769-3
Martinez Cedillo, Astrid and Dent, Kevin and Foulsham, Tom (2023) Social prioritisation in scene viewing and the effects of a spatial memory load. Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, 86 (4). pp. 1237-1247. DOI https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02769-3
Martinez Cedillo, Astrid and Dent, Kevin and Foulsham, Tom (2023) Social prioritisation in scene viewing and the effects of a spatial memory load. Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, 86 (4). pp. 1237-1247. DOI https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02769-3
Abstract
When free-viewing scenes, participants tend to preferentially fixate social elements (e.g., people). In the present study, we tested whether this bias would be disrupted by increasing the demands of a secondary dual-task: holding a set of (1 or 6) spatial locations in memory, presented either simultaneously or sequentially. Following a retention interval, participants judged whether a test location was present in the to-be-remembered stimuli. During the retention interval participants free-viewed scenes containing a social element (a person) and a non-social element (an object) that served as regions of interest. In order to assess the impact of physical salience, the non-social element was presented in both an unaltered baseline version, and in a version where its salience was artificially increased. The results showed that the preference to look at social elements decreased when the demands of the spatial memory task were increased from 1 to 6 locations, regardless of presentation mode (simultaneous or sequential). The high load condition also resulted in more central fixations and reduced exploration of the scene. The results indicate that the social prioritisation effect, and scene viewing more generally, can be affected by a concurrent memory load.
Item Type: | Article |
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | Attentional capture; Eye movements and visual attention; Memory; Visual working and short-term memory |
Divisions: | Faculty of Science and Health Faculty of Science and Health > Psychology, Department of |
SWORD Depositor: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Date Deposited: | 08 Aug 2023 11:13 |
Last Modified: | 07 Aug 2024 16:42 |
URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/36133 |
Available files
Filename: s13414-023-02769-3.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0