Attention Capture Is Not Detection: A Two-Stage Account of How Humans Miss Localized AI Image Edits

As AI-generated image edits proliferate, the platforms meant to curb the resulting disinformation treat detectability as a single, undifferentiated property: an edit either gets a warning or it does not. We show this is the wrong model. Across a controlled eye-tracking study (N=59, Latin-square design, four conditions crossing edit area and semantic plausibility), a mixed-effects analysis reveals that whether an edit is noticed and whether it is correctly judged as fake are dissociable stages, governed by different factors: edit area drives attention capture (p<0.001) while semantic plausibility drives judgment accuracy and look-but-fail-to-see (LBFS) error rates (p<0.001). This dissociation survives correction for multiple comparisons; a secondary interaction between the two factors does not. This two-stage account extends a long-standing distinction in visual attention research (between pre-attentive capture and effortful recognition) into the new domain of AI-edit detectability. We then test whether a generative eye-movement model can computationally operationalize the attention-capture stage: a Transformer trained to generate scanpaths tracks per-image attention with strong discriminative power (Pearson r=0.77--0.82 across held-out stimuli) and, on the harder task of predicting LBFS incidence, modestly outperforms a two-parameter linear baseline even without access to the plausibility label (r=0.52 vs. r=0.48). We report this comparison, our ablations, and our method's limitations (a single fixed train/validation split, not leave-one-subject-out) without inflation, consistent with responsibly communicating what a machine learning system can and cannot do to help curb AI-driven disinformation.