Selective Attention by Structural Alignment: An Eyetracking Study

Selective Attention by Structural Alignment: An Eyetracking Study Aaron B. Hoffman (aaron.hoffman@mail.utexas.edu) Department of Psychology, 1 University Station A8000 Austin, Texas 78712-0187 Bradley C. Love (brad_love@mail.utexas.edu) Department of Psychology, 1 University Station A8000 Austin, Texas 78712-0187 Arthur B. Markman (markman@psy.utexas.edu) Department of Psychology, 1 University Station A8000 Austin, Texas 78712-0187 Colner, & Hoffman, 2009) and in natural scene perception (e.g., Hayhoe, Shrivastava, Mruczek, & Pelz, 2003) proposes that the information demands of the task are the biggest influences on what people selectively attend. In the present study we test the idea that yet another determinant of people’s selective attention is the comparisons they make. We will first review comparison processes and then evidence from Markman and Gentner (1997) showing that people have better recall when they are cued by elements from scenes that are part of structural alignment. Then, by replicating Markman and Gentner (1997) with an eyetracker, we provide an online test of the idea that structural alignment can drive selective attention. Abstract A potential determinant of people’s selective attention is offered by the structural-alignment view of comparison. This view holds that objects are compared via structured representations that align sets of features that share relational roles. A central claim of this account is that the comparison process directs attention towards alignable features. This prediction has been supported by offline measures by Markman and Gentner (1997), who showed that alignable features serve as better cues for recall than nonalignable features. The present study provides the first online test of the structure-alignment theory’s claim that alignability drives selective attention. Consistent with this, we show that in addition to serving as better cues for recall, alignable differences are attended more than nonalignable differences. Within-trial attention dynamics revealed that attention to alignable differences increases over the course of the comparison process. Comparison Keywords: comparison, alignment, attention, recall, eye movements, eye tracking Introduction The amount of information that inundates people’s perceptual systems creates a significant challenge. As people move through their environment, they are faced with thousands of decisions about which information they should selectively attend and which they should filter out. They must decide that certain things are worth remembering and that others are not. How are such decisions made? There are a variety of factors that influence selection of parts of the stimulus stream. Early work examining how people attend to complex visual scenes showed that people will fixate the most informative elements (Buswell, 1935; Mackworth & Morandi, 1967; see Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999 for review). Subsequent work explored people’s tendency to attend to the most perceptually salient features (e.g., Henderson, Weeks, & Hollingworth, 1999; Parkhurst, Law, & Niebur, 2002). Work on schemata and memory suggests that semantic consistency with a schema determines what is later recalled (Bransford & Johnson, 1972; 1973; Brewer & Dupree, 1983; Rummelhart, 1980). Finally, recent eye tracking work in categorization (Rehder, The ability to compare is an integral part of human cognition. Category membership is determined by the degree of similarity to category representations (Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1984). In problem solving, people find solutions by comparing new problems to previously solved problems (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981; Ross, 1987). In episodic memory, probes are compared to memory traces (Hintzman, 1986). In analogy people compare base and target domains. (Falkenhainer, Forbus, & Gentner, 1989; Gentner, 1983; Hummel & Holyoak, 1997) There have been a few approaches to modeling the comparison process, including computing distances in multidimensional space using feature vectors, (Shepard, 1962) or comparing features using set operations, Tversky (1977). And yet to account for human comparison of complex stimuli with relational structure, a third approach has been used. Borrowing from models of analogy (Falkenhainer et al., 1989), the structure-alignment account (Gentner, 1983) represents objects as features inside structures of relations. For example, structure-alignment theory posits that people will encode features (e.g., the people and objects in Figure 1A) as arguments to relational predicates: smokes(man, cigar) or paints(painter, model). On this account, significant processing is applied to building a representation of the relations between features in a scene