In the present work, we investigated the extent to which the prioritization of an object change was modulated by object salience in natural scene viewing. Scenes and objects were selected from the LabelMe database [Russell, B. C., Torralba, A., Murphy, K. P., & Freeman, W. T. (2008). LabelMe: a database and web-based tool for image annotation. International journal of computer vision, 77(1-3), 157-173.] and the salience of a selected object was manipulated by either increasing or decreasing the luminance contrast. In a task similar to that used in previous work [e.g., Brockmole, J. R., & Henderson, J. M. (2005). Prioritization of new objects in real-world scenes: evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(5), 857.], we asked observers to look around a scene in preparation for a later memory test. After a period of time, the salience of an object in the scene was changed, either during a fixation (transient signal) or during a saccade (non-transient signal). When object salience increased during a fixation, it was fixated sooner, and more often than when object salience decreased. Surprisingly, this was also the case when object salience increased during a saccade, albeit to a lesser extent. These results suggest that the prioritization of object changes can be influenced by the underlying salience of the changed object within the scene. We discuss these findings within the context of oculomotor selection based on the integration of feature-based and object-based representations of natural scenes.
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