Citation

Lin SY, Yeh SL. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 2011; 74(3): 533-539.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Graduate Institute of Brain and Mind Science, Neurobiology and Cognitive Science Center, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.3758/s13414-011-0245-0

PMID

22167535

Abstract

Detection of a target is faster when it is presented on an attended rather than an unattended object (i.e., object-based attention). Using the double-rectangle cuing paradigm (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994), we previously showed that object-based attention operates on a dynamic representation: Object-based attentional guidance is affected by subsequent changes occurring to an attended object (Lin & Yeh, 2011). The present study provides further support for our dynamic-updating hypothesis, demonstrating that changes are indeed updated into the existing object representation. After a cue display, we introduced changes between the initial display (four hashes) and the final display (four squares with an occluder between them). We found object-based attention only with smooth transitions between the initial and final displays, not when transitions were in the reverse order (Exp. 1) or contained any single disruption of the smooth transition (Exp. 2). These results confirm our hypothesis that attention operates on a dynamic object representation that is constantly and continuously updated.

Language: en