The effect of experimental instructions on the number of areas identified as important in photographic images

A study is underway aimed at increasing understanding of the design of pictorial stimuli in perceptual experiments. Since this work centers on pictorial scenes, a variety of such scenes must be selected as stimuli. The experiments planned require scenes that are perceived to have at least five key areas of interest. Further, each of these must be able to be cropped to versions perceived to have three or four key areas of interest and one or two key areas of interest. The objective of the present experiment is to evaluate the impact of the experimental instructions on the number of key interest areas identified in each of the potential scenes and its cropped versions. The results of this experiment indicate that observer instructions have an impact on the number of areas observers determined to be important in the test images. These results will be used to select the scenes to be used in further work conducted to evaluate the impact of scene complexity on how people look at images in perceptual experiments.