OBJECT-BASED ATTENTION AND OCCLUSION - EVIDENCE FROM NORMAL PARTICIPANTS AND A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL

One way of perceptually organizing a complex visual scene is to attend selectively to information in a particular physical location. Another way of reducing the complexity in the input is to attend selectively to an individual object in the scene and to process its elements prefe rentially. This latter, object-based attention process was examined, a nd the predicted superiority for reporting features from 1 relative to 2 objects was replicated in a series of experiments. This object-base d process was robust even under conditions of occlusion, although ther e were some boundary conditions on its operation. Finally, an account of the data is provided via simulations of the findings in a computati onal model. The claim is that object-based attention arises from a mec hanism that groups together those features based on internal represent ations developed over perceptual experience and then preferentially ga tes these features for later, selective processing.