Peripheral guidance in scenes: The interaction of scene context and object content

In the present study, we examined how gaze guidance is affected by immediately available information in the periphery and investigated how search strategies differed across manipulations in the availability of scene context and object content information. Across 3 experiments, participants performed a visual search task in scenes while using a gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm. Extrafoveal information was manipulated across conditions to examine the contributions of object content, scene context, or some combination of the two. Experiment 1 demonstrated a possible interaction between scene context and object content information in improving guidance. Experiments 2 and 3 supported the notion that object content is selected for further scrutiny based on its position within scene context. These results suggest a prioritization of object information based on scene context, such that contextual information acts as a framework in the selection of relevant regions, and object information can then affect which specific locations in those regions are selected for further examination.