LOOSENING THE CONSTRAINTS ON ILLUSORY CONJUNCTIONS - ASSESSING THE ROLES OF EXPOSURE DURATION AND ATTENTION

Illusory conjunctions are the incorrect combination of correctly perce ived features, such as color and shape. They have been found to occur using a brief exposure (under 200 ms) and a dual task designed to dive rt attention. The present study investigated the roles of exposure dur ation and attention in obtaining illusory conjunctions. Several mathem atical models of the feature integration task were also assessed. Expe riment 1 tested participants' accuracy at combining features using a l ong exposure and an attention-diverting task. Experiment 2 compared pe rformance with and without the attention-diverting task. The final exp eriment compared performance using a brief (0.15 s) and a long (1.5 s) exposure duration without an attention-diverting task. Neither attent ion nor exposure duration had a significant effect on feature integrat ion.