What does attention select in visual search, and why?
” Perception 34 ECVP Abstract Supplement What does attention select in visual search, and why? G Mueller-Plath, K Elsner Space-based accounts of visual attention assume that attention enhances processing of a limited spatial region, independently of the number of objects it contains. Object-based accounts propose that attention selects a limited number of objects, independently of their spatial location. With a series of visual-search tasks, we investigated potential boundary conditions on the operation mode of attention, and related it to the function attention may serve in each task. Search target was always a horizontally oriented ellipse among differently oriented distractor ellipses. Across four experiments, we orthogonally manipulated target – distractor similarity (TD) by the shapes of ellipses, and distractor – distractor similarity (DD) by homogeneous or heterogeneous distractor orientations. We assessed the nature of processing limitation in each experiment with the following
