Abstract
In time-based visual selection, task-irrelevant, old stimuli can be inhibited in order to allow the selective processing of new stimuli that appear at a later point in time (the preview benefit; Watson & Humphreys, 1997). The current study investigated if illusory and non-illusory perceptual groups influence the ability to inhibit old and prioritize new stimuli in time-based visual selection. Experiment 1 showed that with Kanizsa-type illusory stimuli, a preview benefit occurred only when displays contained a small number of items. Experiment 2 demonstrated that a set of Kanizsa-type illusory stimuli could be selectively searched amongst a set of non-illusory distractors with no additional preview benefit obtained by separating the two sets of stimuli in time. Experiment 3 showed that, similarly to Experiment 1, non-illusory perceptual groups also produced a preview benefit only for a small number of number of distractors. Experiment 4 demonstrated that local changes to perceptually grouped old items eliminated the preview benefit. The results indicate that the preview benefit is reduced in capacity when applied to complex stimuli that require perceptual grouping, regardless of whether the grouped elements elicit illusory contours. Further, inhibition is applied at the level of grouped objects, rather than to the individual elements making up those groups. The findings are discussed in terms of capacity limits in the inhibition of old distractor stimuli when they consist of perceptual groups, the attentional requirements of forming perceptual groups and the mechanisms and efficiency of time-based visual selection.
Highlights
Perceptual grouping enables humans to perceive discrete components as parts of a single object by establishing an interrelation of elements to form a particular shape
The results from the experiments in this study suggest that perceptual grouping reduces the number of distractors that can be inhibited in time-based visual selection, reducing the ability to prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli
Our findings show for the first time that resources required for perceiving Kanizsatype illusory contours are likely to result from perceptual grouping and not the inference of the illusory figure
Summary
Perceptual grouping enables humans to perceive discrete components as parts of a single object by establishing an interrelation of elements to form a particular shape. We examine for the first time whether the requirements for perceptual grouping of stimulus elements may compromise the ability to ignore such irrelevant stimuli and efficiently prioritize new stimuli in time-based visual selection (Watson & Humphreys, 1997). This is an important question given the large number of grouping cues that can exist in real-world scenes that may impact how visual search operates in temporal contexts
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