台大心理系

Visual search is usually more efficient if the searched target was a salient item or on a salient location. However, we found a counterintuitive phenomenon that a target is actually more difficult to find if it was placed on a collinear salient structure, which is called the collinear masking effect. According to the V1 model of salience, we first created a “super salient” collinear structure by combining continuous perceptual grouping and feature contrast. Later, we found that a local target was more difficult to discriminate if the target was overlapping with the collinear structure, comparing to the target in the background. The data cumulated till now suggest that this masking effect links specific to perceptual grouping of good continuity and the edge perception of an object. Our work reveals how object perception links to attentional capture, and in which conditions perceptual grouping can facilitate or impair attention selection.