Deniz

Boz, PSY521, Week 3, 08/10/14, Response Paper to:

Does Visual Attention Select Objects or Locations? (Vecera and Farah, 1994)

As the title clearly implies, the foremost endeavor of the paper of concern is to address
arguably the most fundamental question in visual attention literature: Does the
attentional system favor spatial or object features of visual stimuli, one type more than
the other, when selecting the stimuli for further processing? To achieve this rather
overarching goal, the authors first cite empirical evidence culled from both camps of
the literature, and then present a series of experiments they conducted based on these
previous findings.

The first of the four experiments delineated in the paper was run so as to test the hypotheses trying to draw alternative, location-based conclusions from Duncan's (1984)
influential experiment, in which the object-based aspect of visual attention was nicely
demonstrated. Since the main goal of the experiment was to test whether object-based
attention operates on, in authors words, spatially invariant objects, the experiment
consisted of two main configurations; one identical to that of Duncans (1984) and
other a variant of it, in which the objects presented separately, instead of superimposed. The results corroborate the object-based account, since the accuracy of
reporting two dimensions from one object was significantly higher than of reporting
one dimension from each object, regardless of configuration (i.e. together vs. separate),
and there was no interaction between object configuration and the reported dimensions (from same vs. different objects), according to the analysis between group means.
Derived from the first one, the second experiment was designed to rule out the
possibility that subjects performed so well in the separate condition because there was
nothing to filter out in terms of distraction. To do this, distractors added to first setup.

In this new configuration, results were almost same as the first experiment, albeit the
overall accuracy were slightly declined for both object configurations (together vs.
separate), again supporting the object-based view of visual attention.
The third experiment was of the most importance in my opinion. This is because, I
think, it was a remarkable paradigm in the way that the target stimulus was located
on one of the objects, thus forcing the subject to search for the target on the object
without processing the object per se in a higher level. The results of this experiment
were also highly elucidative, revealing the cue type (valid vs. invalid) was important
only for the separate condition, supporting the location-based account in a rather
object-based configuration. The last experiment were identical to the separate condition of the third one, only this time with an eye-tracker; to ascertain all former findings
were resulted from covert attention.

In sum, the paper was highly comprehensive in the way that it refers many issues as
regards the nature of attentional selection, such as early vs. late selections of bottleneck and gestalt properties of grouped objects, and self-critical by addressing almost
every possible counter-explanations for its findings, such as possibility of judging the
aspect ratio of the box stimulus instead of its height and the possible contamination of
data because of overt eye shifts, even it was upheld by a fourth experiment.

The experiments conducted were rigorously designed and described concisely in the
paper. The only limitation I can think of is the 9-inch, 512x342 pixels computer
display that is used in all experiments, which is I think relatively small for such experiments. But this is a drawback of the date at which the study was carried out and has
hardly a noteworthy effect on the results.

To sum up, the paper is particularly cogent for the reason that it presents clear
evidence for, as Duncan (1984) puts it, object-based and space-based theories of attentional selection are not mutually exclusive, and the type of attentional selection
depends on the nature of the complex stimuli.

References
Duncan, J. (1984). Selective attention and the organization of visual information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 501-517.