ATTENTION TO ORIENTATION, SIZE, LUMINANCE, AND COLOR - ATTENTIONAL FAILURE WITHIN THE FORM DOMAIN

Whether Ss can attend to physical dimensions of objects without access to semantic information about them was examined. Ss decided which of 2 laterally presented pictures, a target and a distracter, had the sam e orientation (Experiment 1), size (Experiment 2), luminance (Experime nt 3), or color (Experiment 4) as a reference picture. In each experim ent, the matching stimuli were either physically identical, semantical ly related, or semantically unrelated. The reference stimulus and the distracter were either semantically related or unrelated. When matchin g was based on orientation or on size, performance was facilitated whe n the matching stimuli were semantically related, and it was disrupted when the distracter was semantically related to the reference stimulu s. Semantic effects were eliminated when matching was based on luminan ce or color. The results are discussed in terms of physiological data, form and surface information, and global and local processing.