The effects of saccade-contingent changes on oculomotor capture: salience is important even beyond the first...

Whenever a novel scene is presented, visual salience merely plays a transient role in oculomotor selection. Unique stimulus properties, such as a distinct and, thereby, salient color, affect the oculomotor response only when observers react relatively quickly. For slower responses, or for consecutive ones, salience-driven effects appear completely absent. To date, however, the circumstances that may reinstate the effects of salience over multiple eye movements are still unclear. Recent research shows that changes to a scene can attract gaze, even when these changes occur without a transient signal (i.e., during an eye movement). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether this capture is mediated through salience-driven or memory-guided processes. In three experiments, we examined how the nature of a change in salience that occurred during an eye movement affected consecutive saccades. The results demonstrate that the oculomotor system is exclusively susceptible to increases in salience from one fixation to the next, but only when these increases result in a uniquely high salience level. This suggests that even in the case of a saccade-contingent change, oculomotor selection behavior can be affected by salience-driven mechanisms, possibly to allow the automatic detection of uniquely distinct objects at any moment. The results and implications will be discussed in relation to current views on visual selection.