The role of redundancy in the object-line effect

Subjects’ identification of briefly presented target fines can sometimes be facilitated by including noninformative lines of context in the display (the object-fine effect). Previous explanations for this effect have claimed that stimulus properties such as three-dimensionality, connectedness, structural relevance, fine-masking, or fixation-point detail, allow fine-in-context stimuli to be processed more efficiently than single-fine stimuli. Instead of postulating special processing consequences for these stimulus properties, we propose two general preconditions for the object-fine effect. Three experiments demonstrate that the effect occurs when lines-incontext have perceptual attributes that are correlated with the target lines and when the lines-in-context are perceptually more dissimilar from one another than the single target fines.

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