AUTOMATIC ACCESS TO OBJECT IDENTITY - ATTENTION TO GLOBAL INFORMATION, NOT TO PARTICULAR PHYSICAL DIMENSIONS, IS IMPORTANT

The authors examined whether, by attending to physical properties of o bjects, participants can prevent the activation of semantic informatio n. Participants received a reference object followed by a display cont aining both a matching target and a distracter. In Experiments 1 and 2 , participants attended to motion and to surface texture, respectively . Some evidence for the processing of semantic information occurred. T his result contrasted with a previous study in which no evidence for s emantic information processing was apparent in a color matching task ( M. Boucart and G. W. Humphreys, 1994). In Experiment 3, pictures were used with outline contours composed of randomly distributed red and gr een dots, one color being overrepresented. Participants matched pictur es according to the dominant color. Evidence for semantic processing e merged. The authors suggest that these results cannot be explained in terms of attention operating differently on separate physiological cha nnels. Instead it is proposed that what is crucial in activating store d object representations is whether the global configuration of the pi cture is processed.