Mary-Ellen Large and Patricia A. McMullen
Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Objects are identified more quickly at basic than subordinate levels. This effect
may be due to global and local attentional differences. A global/local, divided attention
task primed a category detection task. Distractors varied in their degree of visual
similarity to target categories. The same paradigm was used in a second experiment and
sizes of global/local stimuli were varied to test perceptual effects on attentional priming.
Both experiments showed that local processing primed detections when distractors were
visually similar and global processing primed detections when distractors were visually
dissimilar. These results support the involvement of global and local attention in object
recognition. Effects of physical size of the attentional stimuli suggest that this type of
priming cannot be explained by attentional factors alone.