Impact of subtle gaze direction on short-term spatial information recall

Abstract

Contents of Visual Short-Term Memory depend highly on viewer attention. It is possible to influence where attention is allocated using a technique called Subtle Gaze Direction (SGD). SGD combines eye tracking with subtle image-space modulations to guide viewer gaze about a scene. Modulations are terminated before the viewer can scrutinize them with high acuity foveal vision. This approach is preferred to overt techniques that require permanent alterations to images to highlight areas of interest. In our study, participants were asked to recall the location of objects or regions in images. We investigated if using SGD to guide attention to these regions would improve recall. Results showed that the influence of SGD significantly improved accuracy of target count and spatial location recall. This has implications for a wide range of applications including spatial learning in virtual environments as well as image search applications, virtual training and perceptually based rendering.