Selecting and ignoring the component features of a visual object: A negative priming paradigm

Space, object, and task selection

“…Similar findings have been found using a negativepriming paradigm (Fanini, Nobre, & Chelazzi, 2006;Frings & Wentura, 2006;Tipper, Weaver, & Houghton, 1994). The key finding in this paradigm is that responses to a target are especially slow if that object or feature had to be ignored in the previous trial.…”

The impact of Degraded distractors on (Nondegraded) target identification

“…For example, high perceptual load (increased task demands) is associated with reduced interference (Lavie, 1995), as is a temporal separation between distractor and target (Kahneman, Treisman & Burkell, 1983;Watson & Humphreys, 1997) and the peripheral (compared with foveal) presentation of distractors (Beck & Lavie, 2005). This is consistent with evidence that component features of visual objects such as colour, orientation, and direction of motion can be selected as well as inhibited differentially for attentional processing (for example, Fanini, Nobre & Chelazzi, 2006).…”

Task-specific, dimension-based attentional shaping of motion processing in area MT

“…These data indicate that strongly attending to one feature dimension may go along with the suppression of processing in another dimension, preventing the spreading of attention to other, irrelevant features of the selected object, and thereby increasing behavioral performance. Similar results on the suppression of non-attended object features have been obtained in several other studies (Cant et al 2008;Fanini et al 2006;Freeman et al 2014;Nobre et al 2006;Polk et al 2008;Serences et al 2009;Taya et al 2009;Xu 2010). As such, a possible reason for the different results on the taskdependency of MT responses is that in our experiments monkeys were more strongly focusing on the feature relevant for the current task block.…”