Abstract
Many common tasks require us to individuate in parallel two or more objects out of a complex scene. Although the mechanisms underlying our abilities to count the number of items, remember the visual properties of objects and to make saccadic eye movements towards targets have been studied separately, each of these tasks require selection of individual objects and shows a capacity limit. Here we show that a common factor—salience—determines the capacity limit in the various tasks. We manipulated bottom-up salience (visual contrast) and top-down salience (task relevance) in enumeration and visual memory tasks. As one item became increasingly salient, the subitizing range was reduced and memory performance for all other less-salient items was decreased. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that our abilities to enumerate and remember small groups of stimuli are grounded in an attentional priority or salience map which represents the location of important items.
Highlights
Many common tasks require us to process in parallel multiple objects in a complex scene
The overall pattern of results is consistent with the hypothesis that bottom-up and top-down saliency feed into a single ‘‘master map’’ of attentional priority and saliency (MAPS)
In sum, our results suggest that capacity limits in enumeration or working memory are not unique phenomena constrained to a single cognitive domain
Summary
Many common tasks require us to process in parallel multiple objects in a complex scene. It has long been known that the number of items that can be individuated in a single glance is limited [1] The mechanisms underlying this fundamental limit in human cognition remain a topic of considerable debate [2,3,4]. This capacity-limited ability is clearly evident when people are engaged in an enumeration task: they can assess the exact number of items in a visual array without effort, being fast and extremely accurate when the items are few, up to 3 or 4 (a phenomenon called ‘‘subitizing’’). According to a ‘‘perceptual’’ account, subitizing differs from both estimation and counting in many respects [6,7,8], perhaps reflecting a particular feature of the visual system that allows parallel individuation of a limited number of multiple objects
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