Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance
-
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform · Dec 2018
How feature relationships influence attention and awareness: Evidence from eye movements and EEG.
Many everyday tasks require selecting relevant objects in the visual field while ignoring irrelevant information. A widely held belief is that attention is tuned to the exact feature value(s) of a sought-after target object (e.g., color, shape). In contrast, subsequent studies have shown that attentional orienting (capture) is often determined by the relative feature(s) that the target has relative to other irrelevant items surrounding (e.g., redder, larger). ⋯ As expected, the results revealed that the initial capture of attention was strongest for distractors matching the relative color of the target, whereas similarity to the target was the most important determiner for dwelling. Awareness was more strongly determined by the initial capture of attention than dwelling. These results provide important insights into the interplay of attention and awareness and highlight the importance of considering relative, context-dependent features in theories of awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).