The Effect Of Surface Luminance Change On Visual Object Persistence

Preserving the persisting presentation of the same object is one of the basic functions of the human visual system. It is also one of the main topics studied by psychologists. Since the object reviewing paradigm is created by Kahneman et al. on the base of Object File Theory, psychologists have viewed the Object Specific Previewing Benefits (OSPB) as a key index of object persistence. The majority of them believed the temporal and spatial information instead of feature information guided the object persistence. However, most of them only consider the role of static feature while neglecting the role of dynamic feature change.On the basis of Yang's study (2009), the role of surface feature change during object moving in preserving persisting object representation was explored in this study within the framework of object files theory. Moreover, effective measure was taken to get rid of the effect of participants'strategy. Experiment 1 verified the basic OSPB. Experiment 2 verified the OSPB in the revised object reviewing paradigm. With the revised object reviewing paradigm, the following three experiments investigate the role of object's luminance. Experiment 3 and experiment 4 examined the OSPB in the condition of object's luminance becoming stronger and weaker separately. And experiment 5 examined the OSPB in the condition of object's luminance changing randomly.The results show that:(1) Experiment 1 verified that significant OSPB can be found with the classical object reviewing paradigm. (2) Experiment 2 verified that significant OSPB can also be found with the revised object reviewing paradigm. (3) Experiment 3 and experiment 4 show that significant OSPB still exists in the condition of object's luminance becoming stronger and weaker. (4) Experiment 5 shows that significant OSPB disappeared in the condition of object's luminance changing randomly. This study got further evidence that feature change affects the persisting representation of visual object. And the underlying principles were discussed.