Attending to color and shape: The special role of location in selective visual processing

Subjects were presented with circular arrays of letters and were instructed to report first a given target (or targets) and then any other letters they could identify. The targets) was (were) a letter of a given color (Experiment 1) or a given shape (Experiment 2), or two letters of a given shape (Experiment 3). In all three experiments, the additional letters reported tended to be adjacent to the first reported target(s). The results suggest that the selective processing of targets specified by color or by shape is accomplished by attending to the targets’ locations.

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