In natural vision both stimulus features and cognitive/affective factors influence an observer’s attention. However, the relationship between stimulus-driven (“bottom-up”) and cognitive/affective (“top-down”) factors remains controversial: Can affective salience counteract strong visual stimulus signals and shift attention allocation irrespective of bottom-up features? Is there any difference between negative and positive scenes in terms of their influence on attention deployment? Here we examined the impact of affective factors on eye movement behavior, to understand the competition between visual stimulus-driven salience and affective salience and how they affect gaze allocation in complex scene viewing. Building on our previous research, we compared predictions generated by a visual salience model with measures indexing participant-identified emotionally meaningful regions of each image. To examine how eye movement behavior differs for negative, positive, and neutral scenes, we examined the influence of affective salience in capturing attention according to emotional valence. Taken together, our results show that affective salience can override stimulus-driven salience and overall emotional valence can determine attention allocation in complex scenes. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive/affective factors play a dominant role in active gaze control.

In natural vision both stimulus features and cognitive/affective factors influence an observer's attention. However, the relationship between stimulus-driven (bottom-up) and cognitive/affective (top-down) factors remains controversial: How well does the classic visual salience model account for gaze locations? Can emotional salience counteract strong visual stimulus signals and shift attention allocation irrespective of bottom-up features? Here we compared Itti and Koch's [2000] and Spectral Residual (SR) visual salience model and explored the impact of visual salience and emotional salience on eye movement behavior, to understand the competition between visual salience and emotional salience and how they affect gaze allocation in complex scenes viewing. Our results show the insufficiency of visual salience models in predicting fixation. Emotional salience can override visual salience and can determine attention allocation in complex scenes. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive/affective factors play a dominant role in active gaze control.