Abstract
Visual search in naturalistic scenes has a hypothesis of anchor object. In context consistent scenes, it helps us to predict the locations of other objects and improves the perceptive speed. Previous study (Boettcher et al., 2018) verified the effects of anchor object by the perceptual distance between consistent and inconsistent scenes during visual search. Furthermore, there is a possibility that anchor object affects us not only during searching but also at an early stage of it. Therefore, we proposed a hypothesis that predicts the location of other object immediately after perceiving anchor object. In our experiment, 20 images were presented to 15 participants (2 female, our lab members) for 100ms each. We made the image dataset, and we selected "the sink" or "the table (desk)" as anchor object in the image. We selected a small object as “the target”, which was close to the anchor object. We think this may be affected by the anchor object. We asked participants presence or absence of anchor object by multiple-choice question, and the position of the target using the mouse, every images. Accuracy in both cases were compared by the distances between predictive and correct points. The results showed that participants selected anchor object 238 times, didn't select 62 times. Mean distance between predicted position and correct position was M = 335px, 95% CI [301,369] in selected case, the other case was M = 474px, 95% CI [392,555]. In addition, we used Welch's t-test to compare two groups (t (83) = 3.12,p = 0.00248, Cohen’s d = 0.503). According to the results, the case of perceiving anchor object has tendency to predict better than the other case. This suggests that the position of the target is predicted immediately when we perceive anchor object.