The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, The People's Republic of China.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2010 Feb;139(1):162-79. doi: 10.1037/a0018034.
In the past 20 years, numerous theories and findings have suggested that the unit of visual attention is the object. In this study, I first clarify 2 different meanings of unit of visual attention, namely the unit of access in the sense of measurement and the unit of selection in the sense of division. In accordance with this distinction, I argue that an object, as commonly described, is only the unit of selection. The unit of access is better characterized as a Boolean map (Huang & Pashler, 2007), that is, the linkage of a single feature value per dimension associated with a map (i.e., a set of locations). The experiments in this study demonstrated the following: (a) Grouping items into a single object (by connecting them) does not improve the perception of these items (Experiment 1); (b) same-object advantage exists only when the features to be perceived are different dimensions of a single Boolean map and not when they belong to different parts of an object (Experiments 2 and 3); (c) cuing the relevant feature does not help perception when the features to be perceived are different dimensions of a single Boolean map but does help significantly when these features belong to different parts of an object (Experiment 4); and (d) connection, as used in Experiments 1-4, is effective in affecting object structure (i.e., affecting the mechanism of selection) in both an enumeration and a tracking task (Experiments 5 and 6). The results of these experiments, together with data available in the literature, demonstrate that the unit of access is a Boolean map, not an object.
在过去的 20 年里，有许多理论和发现表明，视觉注意力的单位是物体。在这项研究中，我首先澄清了视觉注意力单位的 2 种不同含义，即测量意义上的访问单位和划分意义上的选择单位。根据这一区别，我认为，像通常描述的那样，一个物体只是选择的单位。访问的单位最好用布尔映射来描述（Huang & Pashler，2007），也就是说，每个维度都与一个映射（即一组位置）相关联的单个特征值的链接。本研究中的实验证明了以下几点：（a）将项目组合成单个对象（通过连接它们）不会提高对这些项目的感知（实验 1）；（b）仅当要感知的特征是单个布尔映射的不同维度，而不是属于对象的不同部分时，才存在同对象优势（实验 2 和 3）；（c）当要感知的特征是单个布尔映射的不同维度时，提示相关特征无助于感知，但当这些特征属于对象的不同部分时，提示显著有助于感知（实验 4）；（d）在实验 1-4 中使用的连接在枚举和跟踪任务中都有效影响对象结构（即影响选择机制）（实验 5 和 6）。这些实验的结果以及文献中可用的数据表明，访问的单位是布尔映射，而不是物体。
