Domain knowledge moderates the influence of visual saliency in scene recognition

Is the sequence of eye-movements made when viewing a picture related to encoding the image into memory? The suggestion of a relationship is supported by studies that have found that scanpaths are more similar over multiple viewings of a stimulus than would be expected by chance. It has also been found that low-level visual saliency contributes to the initial formation of these scanpaths, and has lead to formation of theories such as the saliency map hypothesis. However, bottom-up processes such as these can be overridden by top-down cognitive knowledge in the form of domain proficiency. Domain specialists were asked to look at a set of photographs of real-world scenes in preparation for a memory test. Then they were given a second set of stimuli and were asked to identify the picture as old (from the previous set) or new (never seen before). Eye tracking analyses (including scanpath comparison using a string editing algorithm) revealed that saliency did influence where participants looked and in what sequence. However, this was reliably reduced when participants viewed pictures from their specialist domain. This effect is shown to be robust in a repeated viewing of the stimuli.