My first first-author publication!

Journal of Vision, Volume 7, Issue 12, Article 3. Page 1-10.

(The answer is: No.)

Of course, the appropriate question is likely: “What in the heck does that mean?” There’s been a lot of research since the late 1980s about what will grab your attention (Yantis & Jonides, 1988) and your eyes (Theeuwes et al., 1998) even if that event is task-irrelevant. Essentially, what visual things can happen so that it’ll distract you? In a standard task (and the one I used), you had to look for a uniquely colored circle and look at it. But sometimes, a new object would appear, or something would suddenly get brighter. The question is: how often do you look at the totally irrelevant event?

The event that has the best chance of capturing your eyes is when a new object abruptly appears on the screen. This sometimes happens in the real world when we’re not paying full attention to the world, and computer user interfaces use this all the time. The issue is that a new object abruptly onsetting consists of two things: a sudden visual change (new colors, luminance, etc.) and new object information (new semantic/meaning plus structural information). The question is which part of the abrupt onsets capture the eyes - the visual changes or the new object information. Proponents of the new-object theory (Hillstrom & Yantis, 1994; Yantis & Hillstrom, 1994) say that it’s the new semantic and structural information and NOT the new visual changes. There has been a lot of research looking at sudden visual changes alone (like a sudden increase in brightness), and the results have been mixed - capture of the eyes is not guaranteed (Franconeri & Simons, 2003).

So we wanted to see if new structural and semantic information without the sudden visual changes would capture the eyes. Besides using abrupt onsets, we also used object morphs, so a star would slowly morph into a circle. This presented new structural and semantic information while minimizing low-level visual changes. Turns out that sudden onsets (visual changes + new object information) attracted the eyes a lot (even though the target was elsewhere on the screen), but the morphs (new object information alone) didn’t attract the eyes in any special way.

From this, we can conclude that new object information must be accompanied by sudden visual changes in order to grab the eyes away from looking at the target. Admittedly, this paper primarily answers a theoretical question and doesn’t have immediate application. But think about how your computer tries to capture your attention: sounds, random messages popping up in front of you, new icons in the system tray, or maybe a sliding message coming from off the monitor. Which one of these capture your attention? And which one of those do you wish weren’t so annoying, or didn’t capture your attention all the time? That’s what the goal of this research is.

Wong, J. H., Peterson, M.S. & Hillstrom, A. P. (2007). Are changes in semantic and structural information sufficient for oculomotor capture? Journal of Vision, 7(12), 1-10.
doi:10.1167/7.12.3 (Journal of Vision website)