ABSTRACT

This chapter describes several things about what people normally do when trying to remember their visual world from a situation in which they were trying to remember pictures. It demonstrates that the functions describing the fixation durations accorded to belonging or nonbelonging objects do indeed change over the time course of viewing and are quantitatively and qualitatively different from each other. The chapter argues that for pictures of coherent scenes, the measure of informativeness that is most useful for predicting both quantitative and qualitative differences in initial fixation durations, as well as differences in the pattern of durations over time, may be derived independently of the specific pictures used. Complex and detailed line drawings of six different scenes (city, farm, kindergarten, kitchen, living room, and office) were used as the target stimuli. Each picture contained a few objects whose likelihood of being seen in such a place was rated to be relatively low.