Object-based attention and occlusion:
Evidence from normal subjects and a computational model
One way of organizing a complex visual scene perceptually 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
preferentially. We explore this latter, object-based attention process
and replicate the predicted superiority for reporting features from one
relative to two objects. We demonstrate that this object-based process
is robust even under conditions of occlusion although there are some
boundary conditions on its operation. Finally, we provide an account of
the data by simulating the findings in a computational model, MAGIC. We
argue that object-based attention arises from a mechanism that groups
together those features based on internal representations developed over
perceptual experience and then preferentially gates these features for
later, selective processing.
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