Directing visual attention by subliminal cues
Unconscious attention shift has been proven to be automatic, effortless, and unresisting; however, whether it is applicable to images of complex scene remains to be verified. We propose a novel method for directing human visual attention by flashing a short-duration visual stimulus before presenting the image. This method directs viewer's visual attention to an arbitrary location in the image without engaging the viewer's awareness. Unlike previous studies using simple stimuli (e.g. simple geometric figures, image of uniform color, or artificial white-noise), we use complex color images for guiding unconscious visual attention in real-world. To our best knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating that short-duration cues presented at arbitrary locations can attract human visual attention in a complex scene. The proposed method is useful for applications that require efficient and unresisting attention shift to the target image area.