Attending to an object's color entails attending to its location: Support for location-special views of visual attention

Abstract

Van der Heijden, Kurvink, de Lange, de Leeuw, and van der Geest (1996) argued that the results supporting the location-special view obtained by Tsal and Lavie (1988) were due to uncontrollable shifts of fixation, rather than reflecting the properties of the attentional system. In the present study, we present an improved variation of the Tsal and Lavie (1988) paradigm and reassert our claim that location is a special dimension. Subjects were presented with circular arrays of six letters of different colors. Three of the letters were enclosed by (Experiment 1) or superimposed on (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) different colored shapes. The subjects were instructed to report the (target) shape with a given color (e.g., report whether the red shape was a square, a circle, or a triangle) and then either freely report letters from the array (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or identify a prespecified target letter (Experiment 3). In all four experiments performance was substantially better for the letter that appeared in the location of the to-be-reported shape (location letter) than for the letter that shared its color (color letter). We conclude that attending to the stimulus color entails directing attention to its location.