Abstract
Object-based attention operates on perceptual objects, opening the possibility that the costs and benefits humans have to pay to move attention between-objects might be affected by the nature of the stimuli. The current study reported two experiments with adults and 8-month-old infants investigating whether object-based-attention is affected by the type of stimulus (faces vs. non-faces stimuli). Using the well-known cueing task developed by Egly et al. (1994) to study the object-based component of attention, in Experiment 1 adult participants were presented with two upright, inverted or scrambled faces and an eye-tracker measured their saccadic latencies to find a target that could appear on the same object that was just cued or on the other object that was uncued. Data showed that an object-based effect (a smaller cost to shift attention within- compared to between-objects) occurred only with scrambled face, but not with upright or inverted faces. In Experiment 2 the same task was performed with 8-month-old infants, using upright and inverted faces. Data revealed that an object-based effect emerges only for inverted faces but not for upright faces. Overall, these findings suggest that object-based attention is modulated by the type of stimulus and by the experience acquired by the viewer with different objects.
Highlights
Selective attention allows us to pick out and respond to relevant information while ignoring the myriad distracting stimuli in cluttered visual scenes
A mean of 20.4 trials (SD = 9.4) for each adult was excluded by the statistical analysis for the following reasons: because adults looked outside the defined areas of interest (AOI) corresponding to the target (M = 6.0, SD = 4.1) or they did not look at the central fixation point before the stimuli presentation (M = 6.9, SD = 4.0), or because the signal of the eye-tracker was lost during the stimuli presentation (M = 7.6, SD = 4.6)
A mean of 20.2 trials (SD = 7.1) for each infant was excluded by the statistical analysis for the following reasons: because infants looked outside the defined AOI corresponding to the target (M = 4.4; SD = 2.4), or they did not look at the central fixation point before the stimuli presentation (M = 6.7; SD = 3.3), or because the signal of the eye-tracker was lost during the stimuli presentation (M = 9.0; SD = 4.0)
Summary
Selective attention allows us to pick out and respond to relevant information while ignoring the myriad distracting stimuli in cluttered visual scenes. Space-based attention facilitates responses to the stimuli within the selected area of the visual field (Posner, 1980; Posner et al, 1980; Cave and Bichot, 1999), whereas object-based attention facilitates selection of whole objects (Duncan, 1984; Driver and Baylis, 1998; Driver et al, 2001; Scholl, 2001). The best-known demonstration of object-based attention is that of Duncan (1984), but after this first study there has been an explosion of adults’ research on object-based selection (for a reviews see, Kanwisher and Driver, 1992; Driver and Baylis, 1998; Scholl, 2001). The object-based effect provides evidence that objects can affect the distribution of attention and that attending to one aspect of an object facilitates the processing of other aspects of the same object
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