A Productive, Systematic Framework for the Representation of Visual Structure

For example, priming in a subliminal perception task was found to be confined to a quadrant of the visual field [16]. The notion that the representation of an object may be tied to a particular location in the visual field where it is first observed is compatible with the concept of object file, a hypothetical record created by the visual system for every encountered object, which persists as long as the object is observed. Moreover, location (as it figures in the CoF model) should be interpreted relative to the focus of attention, rather than retinotopically [17]. The idea that global relationships (hence, large-scale structure) have precedence over local ones [18], which is central to our approach, has withstood extensive testing in the past two decades. Even with the perceptual salience of the global and local structure equated, subjects are able to process the relations among elements before the elements themselves are identified [19]. More generally, humans are limited in their ability to represent spatial structure, in that the representation of spatial relations requires spatial attention.