Target frequency modulates object-based attention
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Target frequency modulates object-based attention Joseph C. Nah 1 & Sarah Shomstein 2
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Decades of research have provided evidence that object representations contribute to attentional selection. However, most evidence for object-based attentional allocation is drawn from studies employing the two-rectangle paradigm where the target distribution is biased towards the cued object. It is thus unclear whether object-based attentional selection is from object representations or a consequence of spatial attention based on statistical imbalances. Here, we investigate the extent to which target frequency modulates object-based attention by systematically manipulating the frequency of target appearance in a particular spatial location within objects to equate spatial allocation, bias specific spatial locations, or bias objects. In four experiments, participants were presented with a variant of the two-rectangle paradigm in which one end of a rectangle was cued and performed a target discrimination task. Critically, the target location probabilities were parametrically manipulated. The target could appear equally in all ends within the objects (valid, invalid within-object, invalid between-object, diagonal) (Experiment 1) or with overall equality between objects but biased towards the invalid locations (Experiment 2). The target could also appear in three locations (valid, invalid within-object, invalid between-object) distributed equally between objects but biased towards the invalid between-object location (Experiment 3) or with an overall bias towards the invalid between-object location (Experiment 4). We observed that while objects bias attention, spatial biases are prioritized over object representations. Combined results suggest that object-based contribution to attentional guidance is the result of both spatial probabilities and object representations. Keywords Object-based attention . Space-based attention . Visual selective attention
Introduction Visual selective attention is the cognitive mechanism through which a subset of the overwhelming visual information is selected for further processing. While decades of research demonstrated that attention is constrained by spatial locations (Carrasco, 2011; Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974; Posner, 1980; Posner, Snyder, & Davidson, 1980), other dimensions that exist within space also guide attentional selection. For instance, scenes in the real-world contain many disparate objects and experimental evidence supports the observation that objectbased representations contribute to attentional allocation
* Joseph C. Nah [email protected] 1
Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, CA 95618, USA
2
Department of Psychology, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
(Duncan, 1984; Rock & Gutman, 1981). In a study conducted by Duncan (1984), participants attended to two spatially superimposed objects (a rectangle and a slanted line) and were tasked to report two features from the display. The
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