Abstract
Disengaging attention from task-irrelevant information is not only a process crucial to navigating the world around us but may also be a skill that bilinguals are particularly well-practiced at as they are constantly juggling information from multiple languages. The current study investigates the extent to which individual differences in language experience are associated with increased object search efficiency in scenes containing mismatches between objects and scene context. Efficient search in real-world scenes relies on a set of rules (“scene grammar”), which support object localization and identification (e.g., knowing that a spatula goes neither in a toaster nor a bathroom). Violations to these rules may impair processing as viewers need to resolve ambiguity resulting from the unexpected element of the scene and have been shown to modulate ongoing eye-movements, even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand. Twenty-one young adults performed a visual search task on scenes containing scene grammar violations while their eye movements were recorded. Targets were either present or absent from the scene, but never part of the violation. Additionally, participants responded to a language background questionnaire. Our preliminary analysis revealed significant interactions between whether the target was present or absent from the scene and second language proficiency on dwell time and number of fixations, with higher second language proficiency being associated with shorter dwell times and fewer fixations to the scene grammar violation when the target was absent. Of note, no such interaction was observed on time to first fixation of the violation, suggesting that these differences might only arise during later stages of search. Taken together, these preliminary results suggest that knowledge of a second language may be associated with more effective disengagement of attention from distracting violations that are irrelevant to the search task.