Lu-Chun Yeh¹, Belma Seferovic¹, Marius V Peelen², Daniel Kaiser¹; ¹Justus Liebig University, ²Radboud University

Increasing evidence suggests that object semantics play a crucial role in guiding attention and shaping behavioral performance during visual search. Among such semantic influences on visual search, categorical effects have been widely examined. However, the influence of contextual associations — how objects commonly co-occur within specific scene contexts (e.g., a cooking pot and a rolling pin in a kitchen) — and their interaction with perceptual and categorical factors remain less understood. In this study, we independently manipulated contextual and categorical relationships between target and distractor objects in a visual search task. The stimulus set comprised 24 objects divided across two contexts (kitchen and garden) and two categories (tools and non-tools). Additionally, we conducted an independent same-different task (N = 34) to obtain continuous measures of perceptual target–distractor similarity for each stimulus pair. Behavioral responses and two event-related potentials (ERPs) components related to attentional allocation, the N1pc and N2pc, were then modeled using linear regression analyses incorporating contextual, categorical, and perceptual target-distractor similarity. The behavioral results (N = 40) showed that contextual associations influence search performance both independently and in combination with perceptual and categorical similarity. The ERP results (N = 24) indicated that contextual associations guide attention independently during early processing, as reflected in modulation of the N1pc component, and subsequently interact with categorical information, as reflected in modulation of the N2pc. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that contextual associations among real-world objects influence visual search across multiple processing stages, thereby supporting efficient attentional guidance in everyday visual tasks.

Acknowledgements: The authors thank Sirine Nouira for help with data collection. LCY is supported by the MSCA programme (101149060). DK is supported by the DFG (SFB/TRR135, KA4683/5-1, KA4683/6-1) and an ERC Starting Grant (PEP, ERC-2022-STG 101076057). This work is further supported by the DFG under Germany’s Excellence Strategy (EXC 3066/1 “The Adaptive Mind”).