Gronau Nurit, Shachar Meytal
Department of Psychology & Cognitive Science Studies, The Open University of Israel, Raanana, Israel,
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2014 Apr;76(3):695-714. doi: 10.3758/s13414-013-0617-8.
Objects that form a contextually coherent percept are grasped more rapidly and efficiently than objects that are contextually inconsistent with each other. The extent to which such clustering processes depend on visual attention is largely unknown. The present research examined the necessity of attention for object-to-object contextual integration processes during a brief visual glimpse. Participants performed an object classification task on associated object pairs that were presented for a short duration (59 ms). Objects were positioned either in expected relative locations (e.g., a desk lamp on a desk) or in unexpected relative locations (e.g., a desk lamp under a desk). When both stimuli were relevant to task requirements, latencies to spatially consistent object pairs were significantly shorter than those to spatially inconsistent pairs (Experiment 1). These contextual effects disappeared, however, when spatial attention was drawn to one of the two object stimuli while its counterpart object appeared outside the main focus of attention, serving as a task-irrelevant distractor (Experiment 2). Attentional modulation of contextual integration processes was shown to be independent of distractor recognition per se (Experiment 3). Finally, the role of goal-directed (endogenous) and spatial (exogenous) attention factors in contextual integration was explored (Experiment 4). Taken together, our findings suggest that contextual associations play an important role in processing multiple-object visual displays. However, regardless of whether objects are associated by active or passive relations, the construction of a coherent contextual representation strongly relies on the availability of attentional capacity. Possible implications for theories of scene and object recognition are discussed.
与彼此在情境上不一致的物体相比，构成情境连贯感知的物体能被更快、更高效地抓取。这种聚类过程在多大程度上依赖视觉注意力，目前还 largely unknown（很大程度上未知）。本研究考察了在短暂视觉一瞥期间，注意力对于物体到物体情境整合过程的必要性。参与者对呈现时间较短（59毫秒）的相关物体对执行物体分类任务。物体被放置在预期的相对位置（例如，书桌上的台灯）或意外的相对位置（例如，书桌下的台灯）。当两个刺激都与任务要求相关时，空间一致的物体对的反应潜伏期明显短于空间不一致的物体对（实验1）。然而，当空间注意力被吸引到两个物体刺激之一，而其对应物体出现在注意力的主要焦点之外，作为与任务无关的干扰物时，这些情境效应就消失了（实验2）。情境整合过程的注意力调节被证明独立于干扰物识别本身（实验3）。最后，探索了目标导向（内源性）和空间（外源性）注意力因素在情境整合中的作用（实验4）。综合来看，我们的研究结果表明，情境关联在处理多物体视觉显示中起着重要作用。然而，无论物体是通过主动还是被动关系关联，连贯情境表征的构建都强烈依赖于注意力容量的可用性。讨论了对场景和物体识别理论的可能影响。
