Supplementary data for the article: Expectancy or Salience? — Replicating Senders’ Dial-Monitoring Experiments With a Gaze-Contingent Window

Introduction. In the 1950s and 1960, John Senders carried out a number of influential experiments on the monitoring of multidegree-of-freedom systems. In these experiments, participants were tasked to detect events (threshold crossings) for multiple dials, each presenting a different signal with different bandwidth. Senders’ analyses showed a nearlylinear relationship between signal bandwidth and the amount of attention paid to the dial, and he argued that humans sample according to bandwidth, in line with the NyquistShannon sampling theorem.Objective. The current study tested whether humans indeed sample the dials based on bandwidth alone or whether they also use salient peripheral cues.Methods. A dial-monitoring task was performed by 33 participants. In half of the trials, a gaze-contingent window was used that blocked peripheral vision.Results. The results showed that, without peripheral vision, humans do not distribute their attention across the dials effectively. The results further suggest that, in the full-view condition, humans detect the speed of the dial through peripheral vision.Conclusion. It is concluded that salience, rather than expectancies based on learned signal bandwidth, is the prime driver of distributed visual attention in the current dial-monitoring task.Application. The present findings indicate that salience plays a major role in guiding human attention. A subsequent recommendation for future human-machine interface design is that task-critical elements should be made salient.

引言。20世纪50年代至60年代，约翰·森德斯（John Senders）针对多自由度系统的监测开展了多项具有影响力的实验。在这些实验中，受试者需完成多项表盘的阈值穿越事件检测任务，每个表盘均呈现不同带宽的差异化信号。森德斯的分析结果显示，信号带宽与该表盘所需分配的注意力总量之间近乎呈线性关系，他提出人类会依据带宽进行采样，这与奈奎斯特-香农采样定理（Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem）相符。
研究目的。本研究旨在验证人类是否仅依据带宽对表盘进行采样，抑或是同时也会利用显著的周边视觉线索。
实验方法。共有33名受试者参与表盘监测任务。在半数试次中，实验采用了注视依存视窗（gaze-contingent window）以遮挡受试者的周边视觉。
实验结果。结果表明，当受试者无法获取周边视觉信息时，无法在各表盘间有效分配注意力。进一步的结果显示，在全视野条件下，人类可通过周边视觉感知表盘的转速。
研究结论。本研究得出结论：在本次表盘监测任务中，驱动视觉注意力分布式分配的核心因素是显著性，而非基于习得信号带宽形成的预期。
应用价值。本研究结果证实，显著性在引导人类注意力分配中发挥着关键作用。据此，我们建议未来的人机界面（human-machine interface）设计应将任务关键元素设置为显著状态。