The effects of congruency between structural and contextual dominance in image processing

This study identifies structural and contextual dominance as variables which when congruent, produced an overall better focus on contextual referents in an image than in less congruent conditions. Contextual dominance referred to the strengths, or emphasis, within a spoken phrase, while the structural dominance referred to the strengths inherent within the visual design of an image. Phrases were constructed of varying congruency to the structural dominance of each of 15 images. Prior to the 5-second viewing of each image, subjects heard either a congruent phrase, non-congruent phrase, or no phrase, and during the viewing period eye movement instruments tracked the image processing.;Each image was divided into 9 sectors and the fixations falling into each sector were recorded. A Kendall Coefficient of Concordance produced a ranking of each sector for each of the data groups, and a Comparison of Rank Order Means identified those which produced significance. Dominance and Degree of Congruency were calculated, which completed the analysis.;Results demonstrated that with images containing strong structural dominance, congruent contextual phrases produced much stronger focus to contextual referents in the image than did the less congruent phrases. Structural dominance was strongest when visual conventions were utilized with moderately complex images, and structural dominance was weakest with complex images. With complex images, it was found that the focus of attention was more influenced by the contextual phrases than by the structural dominance.