It includes a perceptual unit or group, namely, elements in a visual field (stimuli) organised coherently by Gestalt factors such as collinearity, closure, and symmetry.
[14][15] Furthermore, that when re-viewing a previously attended object, recognition is faster when there is continuity between the representations (form, colour, orientation, etc.)
Egly and colleagues provided evidence for an object-based component of such visual orienting in a cued reaction time task involving both normal participants and parietal-damaged patients.
[17] The third theory contends that there is greater interference of object-based attention when any flanking distractors (e.g., visual scene crowding or noise) are present.
[22] Research into object-based exogenous attention has also identified concurrent enhancement of recognition memory, thereby enabling better information retrieval.
This occurred when the memory formation was encoded simultaneously with a change in an accompanying task-irrelevant visual scene, provided they are both presented in the attended object.
[24] This was termed the inhibition of return paradigm: “An inhibitory effect produced by a peripheral (i.e., exogenous) cue or target”.
[24]: 1 Klein hypothesised that inhibition of return is a mechanism that allows a person not to re-search in previously searched visual fields as a result of “inhibitory tags”.
[26] The kind of cues—exogenous (peripheral) or endogenous (central)—have been found to differentially affect the role of object-based attention in visual searches.
Studies measuring neuron response in animals provided evidence supporting the theory that attention spreads within an object.
[46] When attention moves between spatially superimposed perceptual objects, such as faces and houses, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has revealed transient transfer activity in posterior parietal and frontoparietal regions; the latter region controls spatial attention.
The time-course of cortical activity demonstrates the functional role that these brain regions fulfil in attentional control processes.
[48]: 1 [49][50] A 2009 case study involving “DF”, who had suffered bilateral damage to the lateral occipital lobe (LO) area of her ventral visual stream, showed that while she had a normal spatial orienting system, her deployment of attention was not at all sensitive to the presentation of objects.