COGNITIVE MODULATION OF VISUAL ATTENTION IN NATURALISTIC WAR IMAGES

Contemporary television news increasingly relies on multi-window layouts that simultaneously present journalists, live or recorded war footage, and on-screen textual information. How attentional resources are distributed across these competing visual elements remains poorly understood. We investigated visual attention patterns during the viewing of still frames extracted from Spanish TV news coverage of the war in Ukraine using eye tracking (N = 49). Participants viewed 30 randomized images while gaze metrics (fixation count, viewing time, revisits) were recorded across three areas of interest: journalist, war imagery, and informative text. Results revealed a robust attentional bias toward war imagery, which attracted significantly longer viewing times and more fixations than both textual elements and journalists. Textual banners received intermediate attention, whereas journalists consistently attracted the least visual engagement. These findings challenge assumptions in broadcast design that presenter visibility dominates viewer attention and instead highlight the dominance of visually salient contextual imagery. Additional analyses showed that emotionally salient content, such as images depicting deceased individuals, further increased fixation density and viewing duration, indicating enhanced attentional capture. Political leaders also elicited differential attention patterns, suggesting that semantic relevance and emotional valence modulate gaze behavior beyond low-level visual features. Together, these results provide quantitative evidence on how viewers allocate attention in complex news displays and contribute to models of visual competition and attentional prioritization in real-world media environments. Implications extend to cognitive neuroscience of attention, media design, and the optimization of information presentation in high-load visual contexts.