Abstract
Does conceptual knowledge regarding photographs, given by titles, increase viewers' interest in the photographs? Duran and Peterson (VSS 2013) asked observers to rate their interest in artistic photographs by John Gutmann with and without the artist's titles. Observers who saw photographs twice, first without a title and then a second time either with or without a title, rated them as more interesting on second presentation with a title. Other observers who were asked explicitly to indicate which areas of the photographs attracted their attention by placing squares around them placed more squares on photographs viewed with titles than without titles, indicating more areas of interest. Here we conducted a new experiment to assess interest implicitly while observers viewed photographs. Observers viewed 24 Gutmann photographs, half with the artist's titles and half without; title condition was blocked and counterbalanced across observers. They were asked to view the photographs for 5 seconds and afterwards to rate their interest on a four-point scale. While observers viewed the photographs, their eye movements were recorded to implicitly measure interest. We expected that observers would have more fixations on photographs with titles than without titles if they find the former more interesting. Results confirmed predictions: the average number of fixations was larger for the title condition (22.6) than the without-title condition (20.1), p<.01. Consistent with this finding, observers had shorter average dwell times on photographs with titles (1372 ms) than without tiles (1642 ms), p<.01. To create an implicit index of interest areas we identified areas with clusters of > 2 fixations or fixations > 600 ms. Consistent with last year's explicit measure there were more interest areas on photographs viewed with titles (46.2) than without titles (40.7), p<.01. At least as assessed implicitly by eye movements, conceptual knowledge increases interest in photographs.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014