Abstract
Chen and Cave (2019) showed that facilitation in visual comparison tasks that had previously been attributed to object-based attention could more directly be explained as facilitation in comparing two shapes that are configured horizontally rather than vertically. They also cued the orientation of the upcoming stimulus configuration without cuing its location and found an asymmetry: the orientation cue only enhanced performance for vertical configurations. The current study replicates the horizontal benefit in visual comparison and again demonstrates that it is independent of surrounding object boundaries. In these experiments, the cue is informative about the location of the target configuration as well as its orientation, and it enhances performance for both horizontal and vertical configurations; there is no asymmetry. Either a long or a short cue can enhance performance when it is valid. Thus, Chen and Cave’s cuing asymmetry seems to reflect unusual aspects of an attentional set for orientation that must be established without knowing the upcoming stimulus location. Taken together, these studies show that a location-specific cue enhances comparison independently of the horizontal advantage, while a location-nonspecific cue produces a different type of attentional set that does not enhance comparison in horizontal configurations.
Highlights
The importance of perceptual group or object in guiding visual attention has long been recognized [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Chen and Cave showed that even when object effects were found in some conditions, it was unlikely that these effects demonstrated object-based attentional guidance because the same pattern of data was found when the rectangles were removed and replaced with a salient orientation cue. These results indicate that many object effects reported in previous research that used two-stimulus comparison tasks could reflect a horizontal target configuration benefit rather than object-based attention
The data were treated in the same way as that in Experiment 1, i.e., trials above or below two standard deviations were excluded from both reaction times (RTs) and error analyses
Summary
The importance of perceptual group or object in guiding visual attention has long been recognized [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Francolini and Egeth [2] used Stroop-like stimuli [7] with color as the target defining feature, and found increased reaction times (RTs) when the inconsistent information had the feature of the to-be-attended target items, but not when it had the feature of the to-be-ignored distractor items. Reporting a second feature incurred a cost only when the two features belonged to different objects. These and other related findings demonstrated the importance of perceptual group or object in visual information
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