Abstract:Priming reflects an important means of learning that is mediated by implicit memory. Importantly, priming occurs for previously viewed objects (item-specific priming) and their category relatives (category-wide priming). Two distinct neural mechanisms are known to mediate priming, including the sharpening of a neural object representation and the retrieval of stimulus-response mappings. Here, we investigated whether the relationship between these neural mechanisms could help explain why item-specific priming g… Show more
“…Other strands of research in vision science also converge on the evidence that a great deal of information, including highlevel conceptual information, is available in extra-foveal vision, either covertly or pre-attentively, prior to the first deployment of overt attention. Saccadic programming is, for example, facilitated when attention is covertly deployed to the target object (e.g., Kowler, Anderson, Dosher, & Blaser, 1995), and its recognition enhanced when the target is crowded by other objects (e.g., Harrison, Mattingley, & Remington, 2013;B. A. Wolfe & Whitney, 2014).…”
Eye-tracking studies using arrays of objects have demonstrated that some high-level processing of object semantics can occur in extra-foveal vision, but its role on the allocation of early overt attention is still unclear. This eye-tracking visual search study contributes novel findings by examining the role of object-to-object semantic relatedness and visual saliency on search responses and eye-movement behaviour across arrays of increasing size (3, 5, 7). Our data show that a critical object was looked at earlier and for longer when it was semantically unrelated than related to the other objects in the display, both when it was the search target (target-present trials) and when it was a target’s semantically related competitor (target-absent trials). Semantic relatedness effects manifested already during the very first fixation after array onset, were consistently found for increasing set sizes, and were independent of low-level visual saliency, which did not play any role. We conclude that object semantics can be extracted early in extra-foveal vision and capture overt attention from the very first fixation. These findings pose a challenge to models of visual attention which assume that overt attention is guided by the visual appearance of stimuli, rather than by their semantics.
“…Other strands of research in vision science also converge on the evidence that a great deal of information, including highlevel conceptual information, is available in extra-foveal vision, either covertly or pre-attentively, prior to the first deployment of overt attention. Saccadic programming is, for example, facilitated when attention is covertly deployed to the target object (e.g., Kowler, Anderson, Dosher, & Blaser, 1995), and its recognition enhanced when the target is crowded by other objects (e.g., Harrison, Mattingley, & Remington, 2013;B. A. Wolfe & Whitney, 2014).…”
Eye-tracking studies using arrays of objects have demonstrated that some high-level processing of object semantics can occur in extra-foveal vision, but its role on the allocation of early overt attention is still unclear. This eye-tracking visual search study contributes novel findings by examining the role of object-to-object semantic relatedness and visual saliency on search responses and eye-movement behaviour across arrays of increasing size (3, 5, 7). Our data show that a critical object was looked at earlier and for longer when it was semantically unrelated than related to the other objects in the display, both when it was the search target (target-present trials) and when it was a target’s semantically related competitor (target-absent trials). Semantic relatedness effects manifested already during the very first fixation after array onset, were consistently found for increasing set sizes, and were independent of low-level visual saliency, which did not play any role. We conclude that object semantics can be extracted early in extra-foveal vision and capture overt attention from the very first fixation. These findings pose a challenge to models of visual attention which assume that overt attention is guided by the visual appearance of stimuli, rather than by their semantics.
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