Strategic effects on object-based attentional selection

The same-object benefit, that is faster and/or more accurate performance when two target properties to be identified appear on one object than when each of the properties appear on different objects, has been a robust and theoretically important finding in the study of attentional selection. Indeed, the same-object benefit has been interpreted to suggest that attention can be used to select objects and perceptual groups rather than unparsed regions of visual space. In the present studies we report and explore a different-object benefit, that is faster identification performance when two target properties appear on different objects than when they appear on a single object. The results from the three experiments suggest that the different-object benefit was the result of mental rotation and translation strategies that subjects performed on objects in an effort to determine whether two target properties matched or mismatched. These image manipulation strategies appear to be performed with similar but not with dissimilar target properties. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the study of object-based attentional selection.