Center Bias Does Not Account for the Advantage of Meaning Over Salience in Attentional Guidance During Scene Viewing

Studies assessing the relationship between high-level meaning and low-level image salience on real-world attention have shown that meaning better predicts eye movements than image salience. However, it is not yet clear whether the advantage of meaning over salience is a general phenomenon or whether it is related to center bias: the tendency for viewers to fixate scene centers. Previous meaning mapping studies have shown meaning predicts eye movements beyond center bias whereas saliency does not. However, these past findings were correlational or post hoc in nature. Therefore, to causally test whether meaning predicts eye movements beyond center bias, we used an established paradigm to reduce center bias in free viewing: moving the initial fixation position away from the center and delaying the first saccade. We compared the ability of meaning maps and image salience maps to account for the spatial distribution of fixations with reduced center bias. We found that meaning continued to explain both overall and early attention significantly better than image salience even when center bias was reduced by manipulation. In addition, although both meaning and image salience capture scene-specific information, image salience is driven by significantly greater scene-independent center bias in viewing than meaning. In total, the present findings indicate that the strong association of attention with meaning is not due to center bias.