title: Visual statistical learning can drive object-based attentional selection.
abstract: Recent work on statistical learning has demonstrated that environmental regularities can influence aspects of perception, such as familiarity judgments. Here, we ask if statistical co-occurrences accumulated from visual statistical learning could form objects that serve as the units of attention (i.e., object-based attention). Experiment 1 demonstrated that, after observers first viewed pairs of shapes that co-occurred in particular spatial relationships, they were able to recognize the co-occurring pairs, and were faster to discriminate two targets when they appeared within a learned pair ("object") than when the targets appeared between learned pairs, demonstrating an equivalent of an object-based attention effect. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using a different set of shape pairs, and revealed a negative association between the attention effect and familiarity judgments of the co-occurred pairs. Experiment 3 reports three control experiments that validated the task procedure and ruled out alternative accounts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, E11 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA, 52242-1407, USA.
authors.forename: Libo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Joshua D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Cosman
authors.forename: Daniel B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Vatterott
authors.forename: Prahlad
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gupta
authors.forename: Shaun P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Vecera
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D011337:Probability Learning; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult