title: Beyond the forest and the trees: local and global interference in hierarchical visual stimuli containing three levels.
abstract: Our visual world can be thought of as organised in a hierarchical manner. Studies on hierarchical letter stimuli (a large letter composed of smaller letters) suggest that processing of a visual scene is global to local, a phenomenon known as the global-precedence effect. Elaborating on this global-to-local hypothesis we tested whether global interference will increase with increasing level of globality. For this, we used three-level hierarchical letter stimuli with a global, middle, and local level. When attending to the local level of the stimulus, only the middle level showed an interference effect, whereas the global level did not interfere at all. We argue that, considering the perceptual and attentional contributions to this effect, the hypothesis of global-to-local processing of a visual scene may only hold within a limited spatial attentional window.
authors.affiliation: Helmholtz Institute, Department of Experimental Psychology, Universiteit Utrecht, Heidelberglaan 2, NL 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. Mark.Rijpkema@fcdonders.ru.nl
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rijpkema
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: van Aalderen
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schwarzbach
authors.forename: Frans A J
authors.initials: FA
authors.lastname: Verstraten
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011601:Psychophysics; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*