Exploring the Semantic-Inconsistency Effect in Scenes Using a Continuous Measure of Linguistic-Semantic Similarity
通过眼动实验，用语言语义相似度连续测量物体与场景及其他物体的关系，发现高度一致和高度不一致的物体都更受关注，呈现U形关系，表明语义不一致效应不仅是简单的二分法。
Viewers use contextual information to visually explore complex scenes. Object recognition is facilitated by exploiting object–scene relations (which objects are expected in a given scene) and object–object relations (which objects are expected because of the occurrence of other objects). Semantically inconsistent objects deviate from these expectations, so they tend to capture viewers’ attention (the semantic-inconsistency effect). Some objects fit the identity of a scene more or less than others, yet semantic inconsistencies have hitherto been operationalized as binary (consistent vs. inconsistent). In an eye-tracking experiment ( N = 21 adults), we study the semantic-inconsistency effect in a continuous manner by using the linguistic-semantic similarity of an object to the scene category and to other objects in the scene. We found that both highly consistent and highly inconsistent objects are viewed more than other objects (U-shaped relationship), revealing that the (in)consistency effect is more than a simple binary classification.