Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.