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：视觉高亮能够在复杂界面中引导用户注意力，但其在有限注意力容量下的有效性尚未得到充分研究。本文探讨了视觉高亮（永久性与动态性）与双任务诱发的认知负荷对注视行为的共同影响。通过分析27名参与者浏览150个独特网页时的眼动数据，我们发现：虽然参与者关注界面元素的能力随认知负荷增加而下降，但动态调整（即高亮）仍能持续吸引注意力。这些因素的存在显著改变了人们的关注焦点，进而影响视觉显著性。据此我们证明，当前最优的显著性模型在考虑不同认知负荷后性能得到提升。本文的实证发现与公开数据集，加深了我们对不同认知（与感知）负荷下界面注意力机制的理解，并为开发预测多任务情境下用户注意力的新型模型开辟了道路。