Effects of instantaneous object input and past experience on object-based attention

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.02.004

Acta Psychologica

Volume 132, Issue 1, September 2009, Pages 31-39

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.02.004 Get rights and content

Abstract

Evidence for object-based attention typically comes from studies using displays with unchanged objects, and no consensus has yet been reached as to whether the object effect would be altered by changing object displays or having seen this change across-trials. We examined this by using modifications of the double-rectangle cuing paradigm of Egly et al. [Egly, R., Driver, J., & Rafal, R. D. (1994). Shifting visual attention between objects and locations: Evidence from normal and parietal lesion subjects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123, 161–177], and our results, when the objects remained unchanging, replicated the original object effect. However, no object effect was found when the rectangles disappeared from view in the last (target) frame. This was true regardless of the likelihood of the rectangles disappearing, indicating the importance of instantaneous object inputs for object-based attention. The across-trial experience of seeing a different object (boomerang), however, was found to influence the object effect when the cued rectangles persisted throughout the trial. Unlike previous studies, which emphasize one or the other, we demonstrate clearly that instantaneous object inputs and past experience interact to determine the way attention selects objects.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

The rectangles were presented until the onset of the target for 20% of total trials in Experiment 1A and for 80% of the total trials in Experiment 1B. Otherwise, they remained present throughout the trial. In the rectangle-absent trials, the previously presented rectangles disappeared and left only the target (a square) in the target-present trials, and an empty space in the target-absent (catch) trials. According to the cued object hypothesis, once the object is cued and sufficient time is

Results and discussion

The false alarm rate was 2.6% and the miss rate was .05% in Experiment 1A, and, respectively, they were 3.2% and .2% in Experiment 1B. Correct RTs faster than 150 ms and beyond three standard deviations from the mean RT in each condition were removed, which resulted in 2.0% and 1.7% removal rates in Experiments 1A and 1B, respectively.

Correct RTs (Table 1) in Experiments 1A and 1B were submitted to a three-way ANOVA of object-presence probability (20% or 80%) × object (presence or absence) × target

Experiment 2

The previous experiment showed clearly that the object effect were associated with the presence of the object in the target frame but not with the cue, supporting the dynamic updating hypothesis over the cued object hypothesis. However, the probability of the object’s presence had little effect when object inputs were suddenly truncated. Once they are gone, the object effect are gone as well, regardless of how frequently the objects are seen. Is it possible that “disappearance” is too strong to

Experiment 3

In this experiment, the correspondence between the orientations of the cue and boomerang was designed to restore the object effect when the rectangles were continuously presented until the target frame. That is, the boomerang orientation was such that it would cause the object effect in a direction consistent with the rectangles. If the learned correspondence of cue and boomerang orientation in previous trials was important to determine OBA, the object effect should remain when it was the

General discussion

By adopting the cueing paradigm of Egly et al. (1994) and causing the objects in the last frame to disappear or be replaced with another object, this study yielded three important findings. First, instantaneous object inputs were found to be critical in the occurrence of the object effect, which supports the dynamic updating hypothesis over the cued object hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we obtained the object effect only when the rectangles remained in the target frame, but not when they

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grants from the National Science Council in Taiwan (NSC94-2811-H-002-002, NSC95-2413-H-002-020, and NSC96-2752-H-002-008-PAE). We thank Zhe Chen, Morris Goldsmith, and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments, and Yi-Jia Su for her assistance in conducting part of the experiments.

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Most theories and computational models of attention surmise that it is a feature driven process (Itti, Koch, & Niebur, 1998; Koch & Ullman, 1985; Treisman & Gelade, 1980; Walther et al., 2002). However, there is a growing body of evidence, both psychophysical (Cave & Bichot, 1999; Duncan, 1984; Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994; Einhauser, Spain, & Perona, 2008; He & Nakayama, 1995; Ho & Yeh, 2009; Kimchi, Yeshurun, & Cohen-Savransky, 2007; Matsukura & Vecera, 2006; Scholl, 2001) and neurophysiological (Ito & Gilbert, 1999; Qiu, Sugihara, & von der Heydt, 2007; Roelfsema, Lamme, & Spekreijse, 1998; Wannig, Stanisor, & Roelfsema, 2011), which shows that attention does not only depend on image features but also on the structural organization of the scene into perceptual objects. In the Kimchi, Yeshurun, and Cohen-Savransky (2007) experiment a display of 9 red and green, ‘L’-shaped elements was used to show that objects can automatically attract attention in a stimulus driven fashion.
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Spontaneous Perspective Taking of an Invisible Person
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View full text

Effects of instantaneous object input and past experience on object-based attention

Abstract

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Results and discussion

Experiment 2

Experiment 3

General discussion

Acknowledgments

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Vision Research

Vision Research

Cognition

Acta Psychologica

Object-based visual attention with endogenous orienting

Perception & Psychophysics

Contingent capture for onsets and offsets: Attentional set for perceptual transients

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Overriding stimulus-driven attentional capture

Perception & Psychophysics

Object-based attention and occlusion: Evidence from normal participants and a computational model

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Shifting attention into and out of objects: Evaluating the processes underlying the object advantage

Perception & Psychophysics

From searching for features to searching for threat: Drawing the boundary between preattentive and attentive vision

Visual Cognition

Switching attention within and between objects: The role of subjective organization

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology

Interactions between visual working memory and selective attention

Psychological Science

Selective attention and the organization of visual information

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Shifting visual attention between objects and locations: Evidence from normal and parietal lesion subjects

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Allocation of attention in the visual field

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Psychophysical evidence for a shared representational medium for mental images and percepts

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Mechanisms of imagery-perception interaction

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Can new objects override attentional control settings?

Perception & Psychophysics

Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Accuracy of target detection in new-object and old-object displays

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance