Colour is a source of attentional guidance and object segmentation when viewing a scene. In an eye-tracking study,we examined its role during search of targets placed in consistent or inconsistent locations within realistic scene contexts. Boththe target template and the whole scene were presented in full colour or grayscale. Colour presence did not influence earlysearch, considering latency, direction or gain of the first saccade, but affected later phases, with longer scene scanning andmore fixations required to locate the target in the grayscale condition, which also lengthened verification of template-objectmatching. These effects were enhanced in inconsistent scenes. Our results suggest that observers may not utilise colour cueswhen initiating scene inspection during search but also that colour information modulates efficiency of the search process interms of attentional selection and object recognition, in particular when the context of the scene does not provide reliablehigh-level guidance.

Efficient selection of targets is crucial in everyday activities across the lifespan. Studies reporting age-related declinehave, however, typically utilised arrays of simple, unrealistic objects. Using real-world scenes, we investigated how reliability ofscene semantics (consistent vs. inconsistent targets), target template specificity (name vs. precise picture) and target perceptualsalience influence oculomotor search behaviour in older vs. young viewers. Aging resulted in slower search considering initialsaccade latency, time and number of fixations to locate the target, and verification of object-template matching. No groupdifferences emerged in accuracy and in search facilitation due to a pictorial template or a semantically consistent target. Targethigh salience enhanced efficiency in both groups, with stronger effects in older viewers. Aging seems therefore to lead to anoverall search speed reduction not due to specific deficits in utilisation of scene semantic guidance or in target recognition, andpossibly reduced by enhancing target perceptual guidance.

We examined whether and how image’s semantics and emotion content interact during visual processing. In eachtrial, we briefly presented two emotional or neutral images (a scene context and an object), manipulating the semantic con-sistency and the emotional consistency of the pair. Participants categorised one image semantically or emotionally. Semanticcategorisation was overall better than emotional categorisation, but reduced in emotional compared to neutral images, and es-pecially in negative images. Emotional categorisation was better for positive than neutral or negative images; moreover, it wasfacilitated by emotional consistency and, for accuracy in context images, by semantic consistency. Our results show easinessof semantic compared to emotional categorisation. They suggest that semantic and emotion processes are interdependent, al-though emotional influence on semantic processing seems stronger than the counterpart, with in particular an interfering effectof aversive images. Conversely, image’s attractiveness seems beneficial when evaluating the quality of the emotional content.