Abstract
Attention is required for integrating some combinations of object features, such as color and spatial location (Luck & Beach, 1998). Previous research has shown that features can be incorrectly bound, forming illusory conjunctions of features, when attention is diverted or overloaded (Treisman & Schmidt, 1982). Here we present a new illusory conjunction illusion, using even simpler stimulus displays. As a distracting task, participants were shown three shapes on each side of the screen and asked to report whether the objects were all the same shape (i.e., all squares) or different shapes (i.e., a combination of squares and circles). The center of each display contained four gray diamonds displayed horizontally, and two of the diamonds quickly flashed as two colors (i.e., both green, both red, or one green and one red; 80ms) in each trial. Participants were asked to also report whether the colors were the same (i.e., both red or both green) or whether the colors were different (i.e., one red and one green). Afterward, participants were asked to report whether they observed ambiguity in the location of the colored diamonds (i.e., if they could locate which of the diamonds changed colors in the display). When participants responded correctly to trials in which the colors were different, they reported ambiguity in the location of the colored stimuli 40% of the time, on average. Although participants were able to accurately perceive the objects' colors, they systematically failed to bind those colors to their respective locations.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018