This paper examines the processing of visual information beyond the creation of the early representations. A fundamental requirement at this level is the capacity to establish visually abstract shape properties and spatial relations. This capacity plays a major role in object recognition, visually guided manipulation, and more abstract visual thinking. For the human visual system, the perception of spatial properties and relations that are complex from a computational standpoint, nevertheless often appears immediate and effortless. This apparent immediateness and ease of perceiving spatial relations is, however, deceiving. It conceals in fact a complex array of processes highly specialized for the task. The proficiency of the human system in analyzing spatial information far surpasses the capacities of current artificial systems. The study of the computations that underlie this competence may therefore lead to the development of new more efficient processors for the spatial analysis of visual information. It is suggested that the perception of spatial relations is achieved by the application to the base representations of visual routines that are composed of sequences of elemental operations. Routines for different properties and relations share elemental operations. Using a fixed set of basic operations, the visual system can assemble different routines to extract an unbounded variety of shape properties and spatial relations. At a more detailed level, a number of plausible basic operations are suggested, based primarily on their potential usefulness, and supported in part by empirical evidence. The operations discussed include shifting of the processing focus, indexing to an odd-man-out location, bounded activation, boundary tracing, and marking. The problem of assembling such elemental operations into meaningful visual routines is discussed briefly.

Despite considerable research, the effects of common types of noise on verbal and spatial information processing are still relatively unknown. Three experiments, using convenience sampling were conducted to investigate the effect of auditory interference on the cognitive performance of 24 adult men and women during the Stroop test, perception of object recognition and spatial location tasks, and the perception of object size, shape, and spatial location tasks. The data were analyzed using univariate analysis of variance and 1-way multivariate analysis of variance. The Experiment 1 findings indicated reaction time performance for gender and age group was affected by auditory interference between experimental conditions, and recognition accuracy was affected only by experimental condition. The Experiment 2a results showed reaction time performance for recognizing object features was affected by auditory interference between age groups, and recognition accuracy by experimental condition. The Experiment 2b results demonstrated reaction time performance for detecting the spatial location of objects was affected by auditory interference between age groups. In addition, reaction time was affected by the type of interference and spatial location. Further, recognition accuracy was affected by interference condition and spatial location. The Experiment 3 findings suggested reaction time performance for assessing part-whole relationships was affected by auditory interference between age groups. Further, recognition accuracy was affected by interference condition between experimental groups. This study may create social change by affecting the design of learning and workplace environments, the neurological correlates of auditory and visual stimuli, and the pathologies of adults such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

<p dir="ltr">Many tasks require processing, filtering, and responding to information from multiple sensory modalities. Crossmodal interactions are common and visual dominance often arises with incongruent sensory information. Past studies have shown that visual dominance tends to be strong in spatial tasks. Experiments in a crossmodal attention switching paradigm with physical-spatial stimuli (e.g., stimuli in left and right locations) have demonstrated a robust visual dominance congruence pattern with conflicting visual-spatial information impairing responses to auditory-spatial stimuli, but conflicting auditory-spatial information having less impact on visual-spatial processing. Strikingly, this pattern does not occur with verbal-spatial stimuli (e.g., the words LEFT and RIGHT as stimuli). In the present study, experiments were conducted to systematically examine the occurrence and underlying basis of this distinction. Participants were presented with either verbal-spatial or physical-spatial stimuli, simultaneously in the visual and auditory modalities, and were to selectively attend and respond to the location of the cued modality. An initial experiment replicated previously reported effects, with similar patterns of crossmodal congruence effects for visual and auditory verbal-spatial stimuli. Three further experiments directly compared crossmodal congruence patterns for physical-spatial and verbal-spatial stimuli across varying attentional conditions. Intermixing verbal and physical spatial stimulus sets did not meaningfully alter the distinct congruence patterns compared to when the sets were blocked, and biasing attention to verbal-spatial processing amplified the modality-congruence interaction for physical-spatial stimuli. Together, the consistent findings of the modality-congruence interaction showing visual dominance for physical-spatial stimuli but not for verbal-spatial stimuli suggests that the effect is driven by the particular spatial sets based on their sensory properties rather than endogenous attentional mechanisms.</p>