Alarming Events in the Corner of Your Eye: Do They Trigger Early Saccades?

Abstract

Is the eye drawn to configurations of objects in the periphery that would imply imminent danger? In three separate studies, subjects viewed color photographs that were either innocuous (e.g., a couple tossing a beach ball while a baby sat nearby in a stroller) or depicted the same objects rearranged to imply a potential for harm (e.g., couple tossing baby while beach ball lay in the stroller). The key elements in the danger scenes were fixated earlier as well as longer than the same items in control images. Low-level salience of the scenes was analyzed (according to the methods of Itti, Koch, and Niebur, 1998) and does not seem to account for the results. It is concluded that considerable configural semantic analysis occurs in the periphery; the finding extends previous research showing that individual emotionally charged objects can attract saccades (Calvo & Lang, 2004, 2005).

Keywords: Attention, Eye Movement, Saccades, Peripheral Visual Processing