Meaning guides attention during scene viewing even when it doesn't matter

Meaningful scene regions are prioritized for attention over salient scene regions.

• Attentional priority appears to be influenced more by meaning than by low-level image salience.
• Two tasks were used to explore attentional guidance, where meaning was irrelevant and salience was relevant.
• Meaning was quantified using meaning maps that depicted the distribution of semantic features.
• Image salience was represented through saliency maps, allowing for a direct comparison of their effects on attention.
• Findings indicate that even when salience is the focus, meaningful regions in a scene are still attended to more.

Simplified