Luigi Valio¹ (), Gaia Diglio¹, Antimo Buonocore¹, Maria Antonella Brandimonte¹, Giovanni Federico¹; ¹Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa

Tool use is fundamental to human interaction with the environment. Emerging evidence highlights the role of semantic cognition—the ability to represent, understand, and apply prior knowledge—in complementing sensorimotor and mechanical processing of tools. While semantic cognition is known to guide visual exploration by aiding in the inference of tool identity, purpose, and functionality, the precise cognitive mechanisms and contextual influences remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated how semantically congruent, incongruent, and neutral contexts modulate the temporal allocation of visuospatial attention during tool exploration. Tools were displayed against three types of backgrounds: neutral (e.g., a tool on a plain grey table), congruent (e.g., a whisk in a kitchen), and incongruent (e.g., a whisk in a recording studio). Twenty-eight participants (female/male: 20/8; mean age = 21.04 ± 3.08 years) viewed each scene for six seconds, following a 0.5-second fixation cross and preceding a 4-second blank screen. Eye movements were recorded to examine fixations on functional (goal-related) and manipulative (grip-related) tool components. Participants predominantly fixated tools on their functional areas (e.g., the head of a whisk), particularly during the initial 1500 milliseconds of visual exploration, with fixation patterns strongly influenced by contextual information. A repeated-measures ANOVA revealed significant effects of the visual-perceptual context: in neutral and incongruent conditions, participants directed attention toward functional parts, likely to resolve perceptual and conceptual ambiguities. Conversely, in congruent conditions, the alignment between tool and background facilitated a more balanced exploration, with a preliminary trend toward increased fixations on manipulative areas, thus suggesting a context-driven readiness for action. These preliminary findings underscore the pervasive role of semantic cognition in guiding visuospatial attention and offer new insights into how top-down processes adapt dynamically to environmental demands, shaping human-tool interactions across a variety of contexts and scenarios.