Abstract
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.
Abstract (translated)
视觉突出可以帮助用户在复杂界面上集中注意力。然而，在有限注意力的情况下，其效果尚未得到充分探讨。本文研究了视觉突出（永久和动态）和双任务诱导的认知负荷对注意力的影响。通过对27个参与者在150个独特网页上的眼动数据进行分析，我们发现，随着认知负载的增加，参与者的注意力能力减弱，但动态适应（即突出）仍然引人注目。这些因素的存在显著地改变了人们关注的内容，从而使其显著。因此，我们证明了，当考虑不同认知负载时，最先进的凸出模型会增加其性能。我们的实证研究结果，加上我们公开可用的数据集，加强了我们对在不同的认知（和感知）负载下UI注意力的理解，并为预测用户在多任务处理中的注意力的新的模型铺平了道路。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14232
