Objects of attention, objects of perception

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted, to explore the notion of objects in perception. Taking as a starting point the effects of display content on rapid attention transfer and manipulating curvature, closure, and processing time, a link between objects of attention and objects of perception is proposed. In Experiment 1, a number of parallel, equally spaced, straight lines facilitated attention transfer along the lines, relative to transfer across the lines. In Experiment 2,with curved, closed-contour shapes, no "sameobject" facilitation was observed. However, when a longer time interval was provided, in Experiment 3, a same-object advantage started to emerge. In Experiment 4, using the same curved shapes but in a nonspeeded distance estimation task, a strong effect of objects was observed. It is argued that attention transfer is facilitated by line tracing but that line tracing is encouraged by objects.The effects oflocation on selective attention have long been demonstrated (e.g., B. A. Eriksen & C. W. Eriksen, 1974;Posner, 1980;Tsal & Lavie, 1988). Attention transfer has been shown to require a longer time the greater the distance traversed (Posner, 1980), and attention allocation to a target defined by any of the features of location (e.g., C. W. Eriksen & Hoffman, 1972), color, or shape (e.g., Tsal & Lavie, 1988) has been shown to emanate to its vicinity. Thus, distractors located close to the target cause more interference than distractors located farther away (c. W. Eriksen & Hoffman, 1972), and relevant stimuli near the target are more often identified than other stimuli in a display (Tsal & Lavie, 1988).Recently, however, several studies have shown that other factors, having to do with the layout ofa display, may also have an effect on the way attention is allocated, at times conflicting with predictions based on pure location considerations (e.g., Baylis & Driver, 1992;Duncan, 1984; Egly, Driver, & Rafa1, 1994;Kahneman & Henik, 1981;Kramer & Jacobson, 1991; Treisman, Kahneman, & Burkell, 1983;Vecera & Farah, 1994). Treisman et al. (1983) showed that the latency ofreading a single word and detecting a gap in a frame is longer when the frame and word are separate than when the frame surrounds the word. This was the case even though the distance between word and gap was kept constant. Kramer and Jacobson (1991) and Baylis and Driver (1992) used a focused attention task in which a target is categorized while distractors are ignored. Both studies showed that factors that are known to This paper was written while the author was a visiting scholar at the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago. The author thanks Robert Gordon and Morris Goldsmith for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Correspondence should be addressed to 1. Avrahami, The Goldie Rotman Center for Cognitive Science and Education, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel (e-mail: judav@vms.huji.ac.il).-s-Accepted by previous editor, Myron L. Braunstein determine perceptual grouping in a display (e.g., color, good continuation) affect ...

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