Visual highlighting can guide user attention in complex interfaces. However, its effectiveness under limited attentional capacities is underexplored. This paper examines the joint impact of visual highlighting (permanent and dynamic) and dual-task-induced cognitive load on gaze behaviour. Our analysis, using eye-movement data from 27 participants viewing 150 unique webpages reveals that while participants' ability to attend to UI elements decreases with increasing cognitive load, dynamic adaptations (i.e., highlighting) remain attention-grabbing. The presence of these factors significantly alters what people attend to and thus what is salient. Accordingly, we show that state-of-the-art saliency models increase their performance when accounting for different cognitive loads. Our empirical insights, along with our openly available dataset, enhance our understanding of attentional processes in UIs under varying cognitive (and perceptual) loads and open the door for new models that can predict user attention while multitasking.

翻译：视觉高亮可以在复杂界面中引导用户注意力，但其在有限注意容量条件下的有效性仍未被充分探索。本文研究了视觉高亮（永久性和动态性）与双任务诱导的认知负荷对注视行为的联合影响。我们的分析基于27名参与者观看150个独特网页的眼动数据，结果表明：尽管参与者关注界面元素的能力随认知负荷增加而下降，但动态适应（即高亮）仍能有效吸引注意力。这些因素的存在显著改变了用户关注的对象，进而影响了视觉显著性。据此，我们证明当考虑不同认知负荷时，最先进的显著性模型性能得到提升。我们的实证发现与公开数据集共同增强了对不同认知负荷（及感知负荷）下界面注意力过程的理解，并为预测多任务状态下用户注意力的新型模型开发奠定了基础。