Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2011 Jun;37(3):758-80. doi: 10.1037/a0020746.
Is the focusing of visual attention object-based, space-based, both, or neither? Attentional focusing latencies in hierarchically structured compound-letter objects were examined, orthogonally manipulating global size (larger vs. smaller) and organizational complexity (two-level structure vs. three-level structure). In a dynamic focusing task, participants successively identified the global and local letters in the same trial. Overall response latencies were generally longer for larger versus smaller global objects and for three-level versus two-level object structure, indicating that attentional focusing time increases both with the magnitude of change in attentional aperture size and with the number of traversed levels of object structure. Additional experiments showed that this pattern is unique to tasks that require dynamic attentional focusing. Taken together, the results support a hierarchical object-based-spatial model of attentional focusing.
视觉注意力是基于对象的、基于空间的、两者兼有还是两者都不是？本研究通过操纵层级结构复合字母对象的全局大小（较大 vs. 较小）和组织复杂性（两级结构 vs. 三级结构），考察了注意集中潜伏期。在动态注意集中任务中，参与者在同一试验中连续识别全局和局部字母。全局对象较大时的总反应潜伏期通常比较小时长，而三级对象结构的总反应潜伏期通常比两级结构长，这表明注意集中时间既随注意集中大小变化幅度的增加而增加，也随对象结构遍历层级数的增加而增加。额外的实验表明，这种模式是需要动态注意集中的任务所特有的。总的来说，结果支持注意集中的分层基于对象的空间模型。
