Attention to smoking-related and incongruous objects during scene viewing

This study examined the influences of semantic characteristics of objects in real-world scenes on allocation of attention as reflected in eye movement measures. Stimuli consisted of full-color photographic scenes, and within each scene, the semantic salience of two target objects was manipulated while the objects’ perceptual salience was kept constant. One of the target objects was either inconsistent or consistent with the scene category. In addition, the second target object was either smoking-related or neutral. Two groups of college students, namely current cigarette smokers (N = 18) and non-smokers (N = 19), viewed each scene for 10 s while their eye movements were recorded. While both groups showed preferential allocation of attention to inconsistent objects, smokers also selectively attended to smoking-related objects. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.