The structure of illusory conjunctions reveals hierarchical binding of multipart objects
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40 YEARS OF FEATURE INTEGRATION: SPECIAL ISSUE IN MEMORY OF ANNE TREISMAN
The structure of illusory conjunctions reveals hierarchical binding of multipart objects Edward Vul 1 & Cory A. Rieth 2 & Timothy F. Lew 3 & Anina N. Rich 4
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract The world around us is filled with complex objects, full of color, motion, shape, and texture, and these features seem to be represented separately in the early visual system. Anne Treisman pointed out that binding these separate features together into coherent conscious percepts is a serious challenge, and she argued that selective attention plays a critical role in this process. Treisman also showed that, consistent with this view, outside the focus of attention we suffer from illusory conjunctions: misperceived pairings of features into objects. Here we used Treisman’s logic to study the structure of pre-attentive representations of multipart, multicolor objects, by exploring the patterns of illusory conjunctions that arise outside the focus of attention. We found consistent evidence of some preattentive binding of colors to their parts, and weaker evidence of binding multiple colors of the same object. The extent to which such hierarchical binding occurs seems to depend on the geometric structure of multipart objects: Objects whose parts are easier to separate seem to exhibit greater pre-attentive binding. Together, these results suggest that representations outside the focus of attention are not entirely a Bshapeless bundles of features,^ but preserve some meaningful object structure. Keywords Attention . Binding . Feature Integration Theory
Anne Treisman demonstrated that Bbinding^ features that are represented in anatomically segregated areas, such as color and shape (Livingstone & Hubel, 1988), into consciously perceived objects is a challenge for the visual system, and that focused selective attention is crucial for solving it (Treisman, 1988; Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Treisman & Gormican, 1988; Wolfe & Cave, 1999; Treisman, 1998). When selective attention cannot isolate objects in order to bind their constituent features together, people tend to misperceive which features go together, yielding Billusory conjunctions^ of features from different objects (e.g., Treisman & Schmidt, 1982). For example, a brief presentation of a red X and a yellow Y might
* Edward Vul [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
2
Pacific Science and Engineering, San Diego, CA, USA
3
Quora, Mountain View, Mountain View, CA, USA
4
Perception in Action Research Centre (PARC), Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
be misreported as a yellow X and a red Y. Such illusory conjunctions arise when attentional capacity is strained due to competing task demands or rapid presentation (Kanwisher, 1991; Treisman & Schmidt, 1982), damage to the parietal cortex (Cohen & Rafal, 1991; Friedman-Hill, Robertson, & Treisman, 1995), or neural sti
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