Abstract
Different types of objects that are overlapped or adjacent in space usually have close semantic relationships in real-world scenes. Previous studies have found that different types of objects can elicit the object-based effects and have confirmed that these object-based effects, which are just overlapped, cannot be additive. However, it is still unclear whether object-based effects induced by different types of objects can be additive if they have a close semantic relationship. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to investigate whether and how semantic matching affected the additive effects of object-based attention by adopting the variant of the two-rectangle paradigm and simultaneously/solely presenting lexically defined and geometrically defined objects (Experiment 1) or real objects (Experiment 2). We found that space- and object-based effects were observed for different types of stimuli. The difference in the space-based effects among the geometric only, Chinese words only, and semantically mismatched and semantically matched conditions was not significant. However, the object-based effects were larger for the semantically matched condition than those for semantically mismatched, geometric only and Chinese words only conditions, which were not different from one another. These results suggest that different types of objects can not only steadily induce object-based effects, but also give rise to the additive effects of object-based attention depending on whether they have close semantic relationships.
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Data Availability
The data and materials for all experiments are available at the Open Science Framework website: https://osf.io/jvbk5/.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by grant from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK202003096) and the Young Talent fund of University Association for Science and Technology in Shaanxi, China (20210206) to Jingjing Zhao and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2019TS136) to Saisai Hu.
Funding
This study was supported by grant from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK202003096) and the Young Talent fund of University Association for Science and Technology in Shaanxi, China (20210206) to Jingjing Zhao and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2019TS136) to Saisai Hu.
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S. Hu, D. Liu and Y. Wang conceived and designed the experiments. Testing and data collection were performed by S. Hu, D. Liu, Y. Gao, L. Xiong and D. Yao. S. Hu and D. Liu performed the data analysis and interpretation under the supervision of Y. Wang and J. Zhao. S. Hu drafted the manuscript, and Y. Wang and J. Zhao provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee on Human Experimentation of the School of Psychology of Shaanxi Normal University. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Hu, S., Liu, D., Gao, Y. et al. The impact of semantic matching on the additive effects of object-based attentional selection. Curr Psychol 42, 17985–17994 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02990-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02990-7