Eye-tracking study of inanimate objects

Abstract

Unlike the animate objects, where participants were consistent in their looking patterns, for inanimates it was difficult to identify both consistent areas of fixations and a consistent order of fixations. Furthermore, in comparison to animate objects, in animates received significantly shorter total looking time, shorter longest looks and a smaller number of overall fixations. However, as with animates, looking patterns did not systematically differ between the naming and non-naming conditions. These results suggested that animacy, but not labelling, impacts on looking behavior in this paradigm. In the light of feature-based accounts of semantic memory organization, one could interpret these findings as suggesting that processing of the animate objects is based on the saliency/diagnosticity of their visual features (which is then reflected through participants eye-movements towards those features), whereas processing of the inanimate objects is based more on functional features (which cannot be easily captured by looking behavior in such a paradigm).Za razliku od slika zivih objekata, koje su ispitanici posmatrali na iznenadjujuce slican nacin, kod slika nezivih objekata bilo je tesko identifikovati kako tipicne zone posmatranja, tako i slicnost u redosledu fiksacija. Pored toga, u poredjenju sa zivim objektima, nezivi objekti su privlacili krace najduze jedinstvene poglede, manji broj fiksacija, a imali su i znacajno manje ukupno vrijeme posmatranja. Medjutim, poput zivih objekata, seme ocnih pokreta se nisu razlikovale u slucajevima imenovanja i neimenovanja kod nezivih objekata ('Pogledaj!', 'Pogledaj sliku!' and 'Sta je ovo?'). Ovi rezultati sugerisu da to da li je neki objekat ziv ili ne, a ne da li je imenovan ili ne, odredjuje nacin posmatranja objekata. Polazeci od teorije o razdvojenosti mentalnih reprezentacija, ovi rezultati bi mogli da se protumace kao posledica izrazenosti i znacajnosti vizuelnih karakteristika kod zivih objekata (sto se onda odrazava kroz ocne pokrete ka tim karakteristikama objekata), dok je procesiranje nezvih objekata vise zasnovano na funcionalnim karakteristikama (koje nisu lako uhvatljive u jednoj ovakvoj studiji ocnih pokreta).