An eye tracking study of the application of gestalt theory in photography.

Photography is an art form where integration of the human visual perception and psychological experiences result in aesthetic pleasure. This research utilizes eye tracking to explore the impact of the properties of Gestalt in photography on people's visual cognitive process in order to understand the psychological processes and patterns of photography appreciation. This study found that images with Gestalt qualities can significantly affect fixation, sightline distribution, and subjective evaluation of aesthetics and complexity. Closure composition images seem to make cognition simpler, resulting in the least number of fixation and saccades, longer fixation duration, and more concentrated sightline indicating stronger feeling of beauty, while images which portray similarity results in the greatest fixation and saccades, longest saccade duration, and greater scattering of sightline, indicating feelings of complexity and unsightliness. The results of this research are closely related to the theories of art and design, and have reference value for photography theory and application.

Salient collinear grouping diminishes local salience in visual search: an eye movement study.

Our eyes and attention are easily attracted to salient items in search displays. When a target is spatially overlapped with a salient distractor (overlapping target), it is usually detected more easily than when it is not (nonoverlapping target). Jingling and Tseng (2013), however, found that a salient distractor impaired visual search when the distractor was comprised of more than nine bars collinearly aligned to each other. In this study, we examined whether this search impairment is due to reduction of salience on overlapping targets. We used the short-latency saccades as an index for perceptual salience. Results showed that a long collinear distractor decreases perceptual salience of local overlapping targets in comparison to nonoverlapping targets, reflected by a smaller proportion of the short-latency saccades. Meanwhile, a salient noncollinear distractor increases salience of overlapping targets. Our results led us to conclude that a long collinear distractor diminishes the perceptual salience of the target, a factor which poses a counter-intuitive condition in which a target on a salient region becomes less salient. We discuss the possible causes for our findings, including crowding, the global precedence effect, and the filling-in of a collinear contour.

Unconscious processing embedded in conscious processing: evidence from gaze time on Chinese sentence reading.

The current study aims to separate conscious and unconscious behaviors by employing both online and offline measures while the participants were consciously performing a task. Using an eye-movement tracking paradigm, we observed participants' response patterns for distinguishing within-word-boundary and across-word-boundary reverse errors while reading Chinese sentences (also known as the "word inferiority effect"). The results showed that when the participants consciously detected errors, their gaze time for target words associated with across-word-boundary reverse errors was significantly longer than that for targets words associated with within-word-boundary reverse errors. Surprisingly, the same gaze time pattern was found even when the readers were not consciously aware of the reverse errors. The results were statistically robust, providing converging evidence for the feasibility of our experimental paradigm in decoupling offline behaviors and the online, automatic, and unconscious aspects of cognitive processing in reading.