Lamy Dominique, Segal Hannah, Ruderman Lital
Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, P.O. Box 39040, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
Percept Psychophys. 2006 Jan;68(1):17-31. doi: 10.3758/bf03193652.
Many theories of visual perception stipulate that Gestalt grouping occurs preattentively. Subjects' failure to report perceiving even salient grouping patterns under conditions of inattention challenges this assumption (see, e.g., Mack, Tang, Tuma, Kahn, & Rock, 1992), but Moore and Egeth (1997) showed that although subjects are indeed unable to identify grouping patterns outside the focus of attention, effects of these patterns on visual perception can be observed when they are assessed using implicit, rather than explicit, measures. However, this finding, which is the only one to date demonstrating grouping effects without attention, is open to an alternative account. In the present study, we eliminated this confound and replicated Moore and Egeth's findings, using the Müller-Lyer illusion (Experiments 1 and 2). Moreover, we found converging evidence for these findings with a variant of the flanker task (Experiment 3), when the amount of available attentional resources was varied (Experiments 4 and 5). The results reinforce the idea that, although grouping outside the focus of attention cannot be the object of overt report, grouping processes can occur without attention.
许多视觉感知理论都假定格式塔分组是在注意力前阶段发生的。在注意力不集中的情况下，受试者甚至未能报告察觉到显著的分组模式，这对这一假设提出了挑战（例如，见Mack、Tang、Tuma、Kahn和Rock，1992），但Moore和Egeth（1997）表明，尽管受试者确实无法识别注意力焦点之外的分组模式，但当使用内隐而非外显测量方法进行评估时，这些模式对视觉感知的影响是可以观察到的。然而，这一发现是迄今为止唯一一项在没有注意力的情况下证明分组效应的研究，它也存在另一种解释。在本研究中，我们消除了这一混淆因素，并使用缪勒-莱尔错觉（实验1和2）重复了Moore和Egeth的发现。此外，当可用注意力资源的数量发生变化时（实验4和5），我们用侧翼任务的一个变体（实验3）为这些发现找到了趋同的证据。结果强化了这样一种观点，即虽然注意力焦点之外的分组不能成为公开报告的对象，但分组过程可以在没有注意力的情况下发生。
