The Head of the Table: Marking the “Front” of An Object Is Tightly Linked with Selection

Xu, Yanwu; Franconeri, Steven

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.4185-11.2012

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This role for attention might also generalize to rotation in depth. Spatial selection can help pull the representation of a surface closer to the observer (Xu & Franconeri, 2012), and could play a similar role in 3D rotation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capacity for Visual Features in Mental Rotation

Xu¹,

Franconeri²

2015

Psychol Sci

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Although mental rotation is a core component of scientific reasoning, we still know little about its underlying mechanism. For instance - how much visual information can we rotate at once? Participants rotated a simple multi-part shape, requiring them to maintain attachments between features and moving parts. The capacity of this aspect of mental rotation was strikingly low – only one feature could remain attached to one part. Behavioral and eyetracking data showed that this single feature remained ‘glued’ via a singular focus of attention, typically on the object’s top. We argue that the architecture of the human visual system is not suited for keeping multiple features attached to multiple parts during mental rotation. Such measurement of the capacity limits may prove to be a critical step in dissecting the suite of visuospatial tools involved in mental rotation, leading to insights for improvement of pedagogy in science education contexts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capacity for Visual Features in Mental Rotation

Xu¹,

Franconeri²

2015

Psychol Sci

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“…It is also possible that only one of the objects is selectively attended, such that the spotlight starts at, e.g., the green object, producing (green exists), and shifts to produce (red exists + just shifted left). In support of this idea that attention shifts are needed to perceive spatial relations between objects, we used an electrophysiological attention tracking technique to show that during such simple relational judgments, participants do shift their attention in systematic ways toward one of the objects (Franconeri et al, 2012 ; Xu and Franconeri, 2012 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asymmetric Coding of Categorical Spatial Relations in Both Language and Vision

Roth¹,

Franconeri²

2012

Front. Psychology

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Describing certain types of spatial relationships between a pair of objects requires that the objects are assigned different “roles” in the relation, e.g., “A is above B” is different than “B is above A.” This asymmetric representation places one object in the “target” or “figure” role and the other in the “reference” or “ground” role. Here we provide evidence that this asymmetry may be present not just in spatial language, but also in perceptual representations. More specifically, we describe a model of visual spatial relationship judgment where the designation of the target object within such a spatial relationship is guided by the location of the “spotlight” of attention. To demonstrate the existence of this perceptual asymmetry, we cued attention to one object within a pair by briefly previewing it, and showed that participants were faster to verify the depicted relation when that object was the linguistic target. Experiment 1 demonstrated this effect for left-right relations, and Experiment 2 for above-below relations. These results join several other types of demonstrations in suggesting that perceptual representations of some spatial relations may be asymmetrically coded, and further suggest that the location of selective attention may serve as the mechanism that guides this asymmetry.

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“…Previous psychophysical studies have suggested a close association between apparent motion perception and attention by demonstrating a type of motion perception that does not need to be driven by low-level luminance contrast energy, is capacity limited, and is flexibly driven by an attended feature (Ashida, Seiffert, & Osaka, 2001; Cavanagh, 1992; Lu & Sperling, 1995). The present results show that the type of attention that mediates this flexible motion mechanism may be related to other complex abilities that rely on coordinating one or more spotlights of attentional selection (Cavanagh, 2004), such as object tracking (Drew, Horowitz, Wolfe, & Vogel, 2011) and visual structure representation (Xu & Franconeri, 2012), which are associated with similar shifts in contralateral negativity.…”

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confidence: 64%