Department of Psychology, The George Washington University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2015 Apr;144(2):257-63. doi: 10.1037/xge0000060.
We are continually confronted with more visual information than we can process in a given moment. In order to interact effectively with our environment, attentional mechanisms are used to select subsets of environmental properties for enhanced processing. Previous research demonstrated that spatial regions can be selected based on either their low-level feature or high-level semantic properties. However, the efficiency with which we interact with the world suggests that there must be an additional, midlevel, factor constraining effective attentional space. The present study investigates whether object-based attentional selection is one such midlevel factor that constrains visual attention in complex, real-world scenes. Participants viewed scene images while their eye movements were recorded. During viewing, a cue appeared on an object which participants were instructed to fixate. A target then appeared either on the same object as the cue, on a different object, or floating. Participants initiated saccades faster and had shorter response times to targets presented on the same object as the fixated cue. The results strongly suggest that when attending to a location on an object, the entire object benefits perceptually. This object-based effect on the distribution of spatial attention forms a critical link between low- and high-level factors that direct attention efficiently in complex real-world scenes.
我们不断面临着超过我们在特定时刻能够处理的信息量。为了与我们的环境进行有效交互，注意力机制用于选择环境属性的子集进行增强处理。先前的研究表明，可以根据低水平特征或高水平语义属性选择空间区域。然而，我们与世界交互的效率表明，必须存在另一个中间水平的因素来限制有效的注意力空间。本研究探讨了基于对象的注意力选择是否是限制复杂真实场景中视觉注意力的中间因素之一。参与者在观看场景图像时记录他们的眼动。在观看过程中，一个提示出现在参与者被指示注视的物体上。然后，目标出现在与提示相同的物体上、不同的物体上或浮动。参与者更快地发起扫视，并且对与注视提示相同的物体上呈现的目标的反应时间更短。结果强烈表明，当将注意力集中在物体上的一个位置时，整个物体在感知上都受益。这种基于对象的对空间注意力分布的影响在低级和高级因素之间形成了一个关键联系，这些因素在复杂的真实场景中有效地引导注意力。
