BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Category-based guidance of spatial attention during visual search for feature conjunctions

    Nako, Rebecca and Grubert, Anna and Eimer, Martin (2016) Category-based guidance of spatial attention during visual search for feature conjunctions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 42 (10), pp. 1571-1586. ISSN 0096-1523.

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    Nako_Grubert_Eimer_JEPHPP_FINAL_ACC.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial.

    Download (1MB) | Preview

    Abstract

    The question whether alphanumerical category is involved in the control of attentional target selection during visual search remains a contentious issue. We tested whether category-based attentional mechanisms would guide the allocation of attention under conditions where targets were defined by a combination of alphanumerical category and a basic visual feature, and search displays could contain both targets and partially matching distractor objects. The N2pc component was employed as an electrophysiological marker of attentional object selection in tasks where target objects were defined by a conjunction of color and category (Experiment 1) or shape and category (Experiment 2). Some search displays contained the target or a nontarget object that matched either the target color/shape or its category among three non-matching distractors. In other displays, the target and a partially matching nontarget object appeared together. N2pc components were elicited not only by targets and by color- or shape-matching nontargets, but also by category-matching nontarget objects, even on trials where a target was present in the same display. On these trials, the summed N2pc components to the two types of partially matching nontargets were initially equal in size to the target N2pc, suggesting that attention was allocated simultaneously and independently to all objects with target-matching features during the early phase of attentional processing. Results demonstrate that alphanumerical category is a genuine guiding feature that can operate in parallel with color or shape information to control the deployment of attention during visual search.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): selective attention, visual search, category-based attentional control, event-related brain potentials, feature-based attention, object-based attention
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Martin Eimer
    Date Deposited: 06 Jun 2016 09:46
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:22
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14785

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    575Downloads
    6 month trend
    255Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item