The Important Role Of Semantic Coherence In The Superposition Of Object Effects

Object attention is one of selective attention.Previous studies focused on whether different types of objects can produce object-based attention and what factors affect object-based attention.However,there are few studies on the influence of the interaction between objects on object-based attention.A few researches on the interaction between objects have found that when Chinese words and gestalt principle objects overlap together,there is no significant difference in the amount of object-based attention effect between them.However,semantic relevancy may be the influencing factor of whether the two objects produce additive object-based attention effect,which has not been involved in previous studies.The purpose of this study is to manipulate the semantic relevancy between two types of objects to investigate the role of semantic consistency in the addition of object-based attention effect when different types of objects interact.This study contains three experiments,used two-rectangle cuing paradigm and its modifications.The experiment 1 verifies that the objects formed by Chinese words can still cause object-based attention effect without preview screen and using only a few Chinese words.The experiment 2 used object type(Chinese words,gestalt principle objects),object relationship(semantic consistency,semantic inconsistency),and cue validity(validity,invalid-same object,invalid-different object)as the within-factors,to explore the difference of the amount of object-based attention effect of Chinese words and gestalt principle obj ects in the same spatial position under the conditions of semantic consistency and semantic inconsistency.The results show that the amount of object-based attention effect under the condition of semantic consistency is significantly larger than that under the condition of semantic inconsistency and when Chinese words or gestalt principle objects are presented separately,indicating that the additive object-based attention effect can only occur when Chinese words and gestalt principle objects are semantically consistent.In experiment 3,the gestalt principle objects in experiment 2 is replaced by the real object,and the result is similar to that in experiment 2.That is to say,only when the semantics of Chinese words and real objects are consistent can the additive object-based attention effect be produced.Based on the above experimental results and related discussions,the following conclusions can be drawn in this study:1.There is no significant difference in the amount of object-based attention effect between the gestalt principle objects,Chinese words and overlapping but semantic inconsistent conditions.The amount of object-based attention effect of semantically consistent conditions is significantly larger than the amount of object-based attention effects of gestalt principle objects,Chinese words and semantically inconsistent conditions.2.There is no significant difference in the amount of object-based attention effect between the real object,Chinese words and overlapping but semantic inconsistent conditions.The amount of object-based attention effect of semantically consistent conditions is significantly larger than the amount of object-based attention effects of real object,Chinese words and semantically inconsistent conditions.3.Semantic consistency is an important factor influencing the addition of different types of object-based attention effect.