Method and experiments of subliminal cueing for real-world images

Unconscious attention shift triggered by a subliminal cue has been shown to be automatic; however, whether it can be brought into effect for images of real-world scenes remains to be investigated. We present a subliminal cueing method that flashes briefly a visual cue before presenting a real-world image to the viewer. The effectiveness of the method is verified by experiments using three types of cues (spatial cue, face cue, and object cue) of varied durations. Results show that depending on the cue type, the viewer’s visual attention is directed to the cued visual hemifield or the cued location without engaging the viewer’s awareness. The experiments demonstrate that a brief subliminal cue presented prior to the color image of a real-world complex scene can attract human visual attention. The method is useful for many applications that require efficient, unresisting attention shift to a target image area.