Blending into naturalistic scenes: Cortical regions serving visual search are more strongly activated in congruent contexts

Visual attention allows us to navigate complex environments by selecting behaviorally relevant stimuli while suppressing distractors, through a dynamic balance between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. Extensive attention research has examined the object-context relationship. Some studies have shown that incongruent object-context associations are processed faster, likely due to semantic mismatch-related attentional capture, while others have suggested that schema-driven facilitation may enhance object recognition when the object and context are congruent. Beyond the conflicting findings, translation of this work to real world contexts has been difficult due to the use of non-ecological scenes and stimuli when investigating the object-context congruency relationship. To address this, we employed a goal-directed visual search task and naturalistic indoor scenes during functional MRI (fMRI). Seventy-one healthy adults searched for a target object, either congruent or incongruent within the scene context, following a word cue. We collected accuracy and response time behavioral data, and all fMRI data were processed following standard pipelines, with statistical maps thresholded at p < .05 following multiple comparisons correction. Our results indicated faster response times for incongruent relative to congruent trials, likely reflecting the so-called pop-out effect of schema violations in the incongruent condition. Our neural results indicated that congruent elicited greater activation than incongruent trials in the dorsal frontoparietal attention network and the precuneus, likely reflecting sustained top-down attentional control to locate the targets that blend more seamlessly into the context. These findings highlight the flexible interplay between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in real-world visual search, emphasizing the dominance of schema-guided top-down processes in congruent contexts and rapid attention capture in incongruent contexts.