OBJECT-BASED ATTENTIONAL SELECTION - GROUPED ARRAYS OR SPATIALLY INVARIANT REPRESENTATIONS - COMMENT ON VECERA AND FARAH (1994)

S. P. Vecera and M. J. Farah (1994) have addressed the issue of whethe r visual attention selects objects or locations. They obtained data th at they interpreted as evidence for attentional selection of objects f rom an internal spatially invariant representation. A. F. Kramer, T. A . Weber, and S. E. Watson question this interpretation on both theoret ical and empirical grounds. First, the authors suggest that there are other interpretations of the Vecera and Farah data that are consistent with location-mediated selection of objects. Second, they provide dat a, using the displays employed by Vecera and Farah in conjunction with a postdisplay probe technique, that suggests that attention is direct ed to the locations of the target objects. The implications of the res ults for space and object-based attentional selection are discussed.