Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When referring to a target object in a visual scene, speakers areassumed to consider certain distractor objects that are visible tobe more relevant than others. However, previous research thathas tested this assumption has mainly applied offline measuresof visual attention, such as the occurrence of overspecificationin speakers’ target descriptions. Therefore, in the current study,we take both online (eye-tracking) and offline (overspecifica-tion) measures of attention, to study how perceptual groupingaffects scene perception, and reference production. We manip-ulated three grouping principles: region of space, type similar-ity, and color similarity. For all three factors, we found effects,either on eye movements (region of space), overspecification(color similarity), or both (type similarity). The results for typesimilarity provide direct evidence for the close link betweenscene perception and reference production.