Further Evidence for the Division of Attention Among Non-contiguous Locations

Models of visual attention have, with few exceptions, suggested that attention is deployed to unitary regions of visual space. Kramer and Hahn (1995) recently reported that attention is considerably more flexible than previously believed, such that under some conditions attention may be focused on multiple non-contiguous areas of the visual field. In the five studies reported here, we examined the boundary conditions on the ability to divide attention among different locations in visual space. In each of the studies, subjects performed a same-different matching task with target letters that were presented on opposite sides of a set of distractor letters. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 provide further support for our proposal that subjects can concurrently attend to non-contiguous locations as long as new objects do not appear between the attended areas. Experiment 4 examined whether the disruption of multiple attentional foci was the result of the capture of attention by new objects per se, or by task-irrelevant ...

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