Revisiting the global-dominance phenomenon outside the focus of attention

Previous research has demonstrated global dominance for attended and unatte nded stimuli. In this paper, this phenomenon is shown to be restricted to s mall compound stimuli. As a first step, local dominance was obtained with l arge (8 deg in height) attended stimuli when a single stimulus was displaye d. Next, dominance in attended and unattended stimuli was investigated by d isplaying two large compound stimuli, one surrounded by a square (attended compound stimulus), the other one enclosed in a circle (unattended compound stimulus). The way attention was directed to the attended stimulus was var ied. No dominance was observed when subjects were instructed to process the stimulus appearing in the square (experiment 2). However, when a rapid-ons et cue pre-directed attention to the attended stimulus, local dominance eme rged for attended, but not for unattended stimuli (experiment 3). This latt er result was obtained whether or not subjects were more experienced at loc al than global processing (experiment 4). The implications of the results f or the locus of processing dominance are discussed.