Voluntary spatial attention induces spatial facilitation and object-centered suppression.

Many daily activities require encoding spatial locations relative to a reference object (e.g., "leftness"), known as object-centered space. Integrating object-centered space and visual attention, this study reports a new form of attention called object-centered suppression, as revealed by a novel object-centered paradigm. Specifically, after cueing a location within an object (e.g., on the left), performance at 2 locations within another, uncued object was worse for the location that shared the same object-centered space as the cued location (e.g., on the left) than the location that did not (e.g., on the right). Because these 2 locations were equidistant to the cued location and because both appeared within the same object, the effect could not be explained by space-based or object-based accounts of attention. Alternative accounts based on attentional capture were also refuted. Instead, a novel object-centered Simon effect (stimulus-response interference) reveals automatic object-centered spatial coding, supporting an object-centered account: when attention is disengaged from an invalidly cued location, a negative attention priority signal at the cued location is tagged and transferred across objects in an object-centered manner. Object-centered suppression therefore unveils a new functional footprint of voluntary spatial attention, integrating space-based and object-based selection through object-centered space.