Updating Mechanism Of Object Representation: Serial Or Parallel

Object representation in the dynamic visual scene received growing interests in the past two decades. It remains unclear, however, how the visual object representation is updated in order to maintain the object persistence. Based on a modified object review paradigm first introduced by Kahneman et al(Kahneman, Treisman,& Gibbs,1992), this study analyzed the Object-Specific Preview Benefits (OSPBs) effect in the different positions and identified the underlying mechanism by which object representation updates itself, serial or parallel. This study is of great theoretical significance for a better understanding of the nature and mechanism of updating visual object representation, which could also enrich and develop theories in related areas such as attention and perception.The present study consists of three parts with seven experiments in total. In the first part, the author analyzed the OSPBs when the target stimuli appeared at the up/down locations (Experiment 1), the left/right locations (Experiment 2) and the relative high/low locations in the upper visual field (Experiment 3). In order to confirm the existence of the location effects that the OSPBs were varied in different target locations. The object positioned in the upper part has a priority of getting updated. In the second part, the author explored the effect that endogenous attention had on updating preference via manipulating the endogenous cues (Experiment 4). In the third part, the author further investigated this updating process by examining how different spatiotemporal conditions (Experiment 5) and object moving speeds (Experiment 6 to Experiment 7) would influence OSPBs of distinctively placed objects.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1) The updating process of object representation is completely serial.(2) When more than one object are presented, which necessitate updating in representation, the object positioned in the upper part are probably updated prior to the one in a lower part. However, this updating preference can be modulated by the endogenous attention.(3) When slow down the objects’ motion speeds, attention focus switches between two objects; hence the lower objects can also be updated.Based on the findings of the present study and previous research, the author proposed a serial updating model of object representation, which provides a functional description of the internal process of the updating process.