The Influence Of Attention Allocation And Relevance Between Target And Objects On Object Effect

Attentional selection has been the focus of cognitive psychology for a long period,It was widely accepted that selective attention can be either spatial based or objectbased. To date, five accounts were adapted to explain the object based attention:sensory enhancement, attention shifting, attention disengage, search prioritization andattention spreading. Current study clarified the difference between attention spreadingaccount and search prioritization account with a flanker paradigm by manipulate therelevance between object and target and the attention―pre-allocation‖.Experiment1and2examined the influence of high relevance and low relevancebetween target and object respectively withattention―pre-allocation‖exists. Noobject effect emerges. Experiment3examined the object effect under the highrelevance and no attention pre-allocation condition with null results. Experiment4examined the object effect under the low relevance and no attention pre-allocationcondition, and object effect exists. Major conclusions are as follows:(1)The object type effect in experiment1and2were due to attention―pre-allocation‖rather thanthe mentalsegmentation.(2)Object effect was determined by the object and the attention resource, ratherthan simply attention spreading or search prioritization, participants would performthe task with strategy when attention resource were sufficient, however, when therewere no ample attention resource for participants to adapt a strategy, the object basedattention would be applied as a default model.(3) Object effect arise when both low relevant between background and task and noattention pre-allocation met simultaneously. This result suggest that object-basedattention is an product of parallel process of object representation and attention ratherthan a serial process in which attention operates after object representation is completed.According to the results of this study, because no theory can explain all thephenomena of the experiment, We suggest a attention resource deploy method toaddress this issue. When object related tasks were performed, the object-basedattentionas a―default‖modelof attention whenparticipants were under an attentionresource limited situations. However, when attention resource are ample for strategiccontrol, participants will choose the best strategy to perform the task...