FVS 2.0 : a unifying framework for understanding the factors of visual-attentional processing / Liqiang Huang

Includes appendices (pages 721-731).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 696-720).

Across a broad range of stimulus types and tasks (16 stimulus types × 26 tasks, 1,744 observers in total), the present study employed an individual-item differences analysis to extract the factors of visual-attentional processing. Three orthogonal factors were identified and they can be summarized as an FVS 2.0 framework: featural, visual, and spatial strengths. Apart from one exception (low-level motion), the FVS 2.0 framework accounts for the vast majority (95.4%) of the variances in the 25 tasks. Therefore, the three straightforward factors provide a unifying framework for understanding the relationship between stimulus types as well as those between tasks. Combining these and other related results, the role of preattentive features seems to be rather different from the traditional view: visual features are general purpose, exclusive, innate, constancy based, and keyword like. A general-purpose, exclusive, innate, constancy-based and keyword-like (GEICK) conjecture is proposed which suggests that the features are conscious-level keywords generated by the specific brain area of V4 and/or IT and then used by all other brain areas.