Determinants of Object Persistence: The Role of Cue Type, Cue Duration and Cue Strength

Abstract

Four experiments investigated object persistence in conscious awareness as a function of the nature of the cues that permit the object to be segregated from the background, and identified. A number of factors were manipulated (cue type, [color, motion, color & motion] cue duration after object identification [1s vs 5s] and cue strength [strong vs weak]). Performance was fractionated into identification, maintenance and persistence components. The results show that (1) stronger cues yielded faster identification, and (2) persistence was independent of identification time, and (3) motion cues were associated with longer persistence than color cues. A distinction between dorsal and ventral visual pathways as used to segregate the object from the background provides one way to organize the data.