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Visual statistical learning can drive object-based attentional selection
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Visual statistical learning can drive object-based attentional selection

Libo Zhao, Joshua D Cosman, Daniel B Vatterott, Prahlad Gupta and Shaun P Vecera
Attention, perception & psychophysics, Vol.76(8), pp.2240-2248
11/2014
DOI: 10.3758/s13414-014-0708-1
PMID: 24935806
url
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-014-0708-1View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Recent work on statistical learning has demonstrated that environmental regularities can influence aspects of perception, such as familiarity judgments. Here, we ask if statistical co-occurrences accumulated from visual statistical learning could form objects that serve as the units of attention (i.e., object-based attention). Experiment 1 demonstrated that, after observers first viewed pairs of shapes that co-occurred in particular spatial relationships, they were able to recognize the co-occurring pairs, and were faster to discriminate two targets when they appeared within a learned pair ("object") than when the targets appeared between learned pairs, demonstrating an equivalent of an object-based attention effect. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using a different set of shape pairs, and revealed a negative association between the attention effect and familiarity judgments of the co-occurred pairs. Experiment 3 reports three control experiments that validated the task procedure and ruled out alternative accounts.
Young Adult Attention - physiology Form Perception - physiology Probability Learning Humans Adult Psychomotor Performance - physiology

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