{
  "abstract": "Previous research has shown that colour is one of the most robust attributes guiding attention during visual search and can dominate guidance, with its removal prompting substantial reweighting toward alternative features. However, naturalistic object search differs in several respects from the simplified displays and controlled designs typically used to investigate the role of colour: observers often do not know exactly how the target will appear, and even when its colour is preserved, many candidate objects may share that colour, reducing its diagnostic value and increasing the relevance of information that generalises across variations in appearance. Does colour retain the same importance under these more naturalistic conditions, and how does the relative contribution of other guiding information change when colour is unavailable? Here, we introduce a computational approach to characterising the representational basis of object-based guidance in natural scenes across multiple representational levels and examine how this profile depends on colour availability. Using eye-movement data from the Potsdam Eye-Movement Corpus, we related fixation-by-fixation object selection to cue-object similarity across multiple computational representational spaces, including layer-specific image representations from a deep convolutional neural network, category-level visual prototypes derived within the Vision Spaces framework, and distributional semantic representations derived from linguistic and scene-based spatial statistics. Image-based, category-level visual, and semantic information made complementary contributions to object selection in both colour and grayscale scenes, while cue-object colour similarity explained only part of this broader representational profile. Critically, removing colour altered the strength of some image-based associations but left the broader pattern of multilevel representational contributions largely preserved. These findings suggest that, in more naturalistic search scenarios, object-based guidance draws on target-relevant evidence across multiple representational formats and levels, with colour accounting for only a limited part of the information supporting guidance. At the methodological level, the computational framework introduced here allows us to characterise the representational basis of object-based guidance across perceptual and semantic levels and to track how the contributions of these representations vary across experimental conditions.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 3,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Andrea Massironi"
    },
    {
      "name": "Emanuela Bricolo"
    },
    {
      "name": "Marco Alessandro Petilli"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/emhj1dkxjf8np.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.31234/osf.io/rj67g_v1",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "emhj1dkxjf8np",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/rj67g_v1/",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "bepress",
      "Attention"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Behavioral Neuroscience"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Cognitive Neuroscience"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Cognitive Psychology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Computational Modeling"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Computational Neuroscience"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Memory"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Neuroscience"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Perception"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Quantitative Methods"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Social and Behavioral Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Vision"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1707|Visual Attention and Saliency Detection"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7221103508",
  "pdf_url": "https://osf.io/rj67g/download",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-09",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/emhj1dkxjf8np.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:21:18Z",
      "native_id": "rj67g",
      "source": "osf",
      "url": "https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/rj67g_v1/"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "bepress:Cognitive Neuroscience",
      "subfield": "neuroscience"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Mapping the Representational Basis of Object-Based Guidance: How Colour Availability Shapes Contributions Across the Hierarchy",
  "title_text": "Mapping the Representational Basis of Object-Based Guidance: How Colour Availability Shapes Contributions Across the Hierarchy",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:21:18Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/emhj1dkxjf8np",
  "venue": "PsyArXiv",
  "versions": []
}