THE ROLE OF ATTENTION IN PRIMING FOR LEFT-RIGHT REFLECTIONS OF OBJECTIMAGES - EVIDENCE FOR A DUAL REPRESENTATION OF OBJECT SHAPE

Three experiments investigated the role of visual attention in priming for object images and their left-right reflections. Objects to which participants attended were visually primed in both the same view and i n the left-right reflected view; ignored objects were primed only in t he same view. The effects of attention (attended vs. ignored) and view (same vs. reflected) were strictly additive. These results suggest th at 2 separate representations mediate human object recognition (J. E. Hummel & B. J. Stankiewicz, 1996): One requires attention but is invar iant with left-right reflection, whereas the other can be activated au tomatically but is sensitive to left-right reflection. Both representa tions appear to be invariant with translation across the visual held.