Visual momentum: a concept to improve the cognitive coupling of person and computer

This experiment involved the question of where human observers look in a picture. The results indicated that observers fixate earlier, more often, and with longer durations on objects that have a low probability of appearing in a scene (e.g., an octopus in a farm scene) than on objects that have a high probability of appearing (e.g., a tractor in a farm scene). These findings (a) imply a role of cognitive factors in peripheral visual processing and (b) suggest a possible relationship between the nature of information initially acquired from a picture and subsequent recognition memory for that picture.

When a briefly presented real-world scene was jumbled, the accuracy of identifying a single, cued object was less than that when the scene was coherent. Jumbling remained an effective variable even when the subject knew where to look and what to look for. Thus an object's meaningful context may affect the course of perceptual recognition and not just peripheral scanning or memory.