When staring at a blank grid, one can readily “see” simple shapes—a peculiar experience that does not occur when viewing an empty background. But just what does this “seeing” entail? Previous work has explored many cues to object-based attention (e.g., involving continuity and closure), but here we asked whether attention can be object based even when there are no cues to objecthood. Observers viewed simple grids and attended to particular squares until they could effectively “see” shapes such as a capital H or I. During this scaffolded attention, two probes appeared, and observers reported whether they were the same or different. Remarkably, this produced a traditional same-object advantage: In several experiments (including high-powered direct replications), performance was enhanced for probes presented on the same (purely imagined) object, compared with equidistant probes presented on different objects. We conclude that attention not only operates over objects but also can effectively create object representations.

中文翻译：

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如何用头脑创建对象：从基于对象的注意力到基于注意力的对象

当盯着一个空白的网格时，人们可以很容易地“看到”简单的形状——一种在查看空白背景时不会发生的特殊体验。但是，这种“看见”意味着什么呢？以前的工作已经探索了基于对象的注意力的许多线索（例如，涉及连续性和闭合性），但在这里我们问，即使没有对象性的线索，注意力是否也可以是基于对象的。观察者查看简单的网格并关注特定的正方形，直到他们能够有效地“看到”大写的 H 或 I 等形状。在这种支架式注意力期间，出现了两个探针，观察者报告它们是否相同或不同。值得注意的是，这产生了传统的相同对象优势：在几个实验中（包括高功率直接复制），在同一（纯想象的）对象上呈现的探针的性能得到了增强，与呈现在不同物体上的等距探针相比。我们得出结论，注意力不仅可以作用于对象，还可以有效地创建对象表示。