Milan Stojilovic, “Novel Objects Do Not Always Compete Effectively for Attention”
Mentor: Deborah Hannula, Psychology
Poster #152

Research has indicated that humans and non-human animals prefer to explore novel, as compared to familiar, information in the environment. For instance, when participants are presented with one novel object and one familiar object in a visual paired comparison task, they look at novel objects more quickly and for longer periods of time. This novelty preference is evident as early as infancy and is the basis for object-based exploration tasks used to investigate memory in non-human animals. However, some studies suggest that familiar objects can also be strong attractors of attention when a learned associate is presented prior to a multiple-object display. The objective of the current study was to explore how novelty competes for attention with paired associates. Participants were presented with scene-face pairs and were asked to generate a story about whether or not they were a good fit. This task was meant to ensure that participants were attending to the pairs so that they would be encoded. Subsequently, participants were presented with 3-face displays, each preceded by a studied scene. One of the faces in the display was the studied associate of the scene, one face was familiar but had been paired with a different scene, and the remaining face was new (i.e., had not been presented previously). Eye-tracking data was used to examine the competition between novel faces and associates in viewing patterns. Following this incidental test block, participants were asked to identify the associate and the novel face from each test display in an explicit recognition test. Preliminary results indicate that associates attract attention disproportionately, a preference that is evident shortly after 3-face display onset. These effects were especially strong when the associate and the novel face were recognized correctly, with high confidence. Results suggest that novel objects do not always compete effectively for attention.