Enhancing Saliency Prediction in Monitoring Tasks: The Role of Visual Highlights

This study examines the role of visual highlights in guiding user attention in drone monitoring tasks, employing a simulated interface for observation. The experiment results show that such highlights can significantly expedite the visual attention on the corresponding area. Based on this observation, we leverage both the temporal and spatial information in the highlight to develop a new saliency model: the highlight-informed saliency model (HISM), to infer the visual attention change in the highlight condition. Our findings show the effectiveness of visual highlights in enhancing user attention and demonstrate the potential of incorporating these cues into saliency prediction models.

Shifting Focus with HCEye: Exploring the Dynamics of Visual Highlighting and Cognitive Load on User Attention and Saliency Prediction

Visual highlighting can guide user attention in complex interfaces. However, its effectiveness under limited attentional capacities is underexplored. This paper examines the joint impact of visual highlighting (permanent and dynamic) and dual-task-induced cognitive load on gaze behaviour. Our analysis, using eye-movement data from 27 participants viewing 150 unique webpages reveals that while participants' ability to attend to UI elements decreases with increasing cognitive load, dynamic adaptations (i.e., highlighting) remain attention-grabbing. The presence of these factors significantly alters what people attend to and thus what is salient. Accordingly, we show that state-of-the-art saliency models increase their performance when accounting for different cognitive loads. Our empirical insights, along with our openly available dataset, enhance our understanding of attentional processes in UIs under varying cognitive (and perceptual) loads and open the door for new models that can predict user attention while multitasking.