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PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

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visual search strategies used by participants viewing blocked stimuli in<br />

Experiment 9 there was no difference in the influence of emotion on the pattern<br />

of memory results.<br />

This meta-analysis also confirmed that across all experiments together<br />

visual attention was narrowed onto the negative object in a scene with<br />

participants looking for longer and more often at a negative than a neutral or<br />

positive object. Correspondingly, participants looked for a shorter total gaze<br />

duration and less often at the backgrounds in scenes with a negative than<br />

neutral or positive object. This finding demonstrated the resilience of the<br />

central-peripheral trade-off in eye movements that was found in 3 experiments,<br />

and corresponded to the central-peripheral trade-off in memory.<br />

The two new key findings that were revealed by this meta-analysis<br />

relate to the average fixation duration. Firstly, there was a shorter average<br />

fixation duration in Experiment 10 than in Experiments 7, 8 and 9.<br />

One possibility is that the shorter average fixation duration in<br />

Experiment 10 reflects a more extensive search of the scene as participants<br />

move their eyes around more. The cue of the emotion may have increased the<br />

salience of the emotion of that scene and lead participants to a more extensive<br />

search of the scene to check the location of the source of the emotion.<br />

Alternatively, the cue of the emotion may have enhanced the perceived<br />

distinctiveness of each item and piqued the interest of participants to a greater<br />

degree than in the other experiments, therefore leading them to search the<br />

scene to a greater extent.<br />

Alternatively, average fixation duration has been reported to reflect<br />

level of visual processing complexity (e.g. Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989) and it<br />

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