Are emotional objects visually salient? The Emotional Maps Database

Abstract The visual system prioritizes emotional content in natural scenes, but it is unclear whether emotional objects are systematically more salient. We compare emotional maps - created by averaging multiple manual selections of the most meaningful regions in images of negative, positive, and neutral affective valence - with saliency maps generated by Graph-Based Visual Saliency, Proto-object, and SalGAN models. We found that similarity between emotional and saliency maps is modulated by the scenes’ arousal and valence ratings: the more negative and high-arousing content, the less it was salient. Simultaneously, the negative and high-arousing content was the easiest to identify by the participants, as shown by the highest inter-individual agreement in the selections. Our results support the “affective gap” hypothesis, i.e., decoupling of emotional meaning from image’s formal features. The Emotional Maps Database created for this study, proven useful in gaze fixation prediction, is available online for scientific use.