Do you want to see the tree? Ignore the forest: inhibitory control during local processing: a negative priming study of local-global processing.
The visual environment consists of global structures (e.g., a forest) made up of local parts (e.g., trees). When compound stimuli are presented (e.g., large global letters composed of arrangements of small local letters), the global unattended information slows responses to local targets. Using a negative priming paradigm, we investigated whether inhibition is required to process hierarchical stimuli when information at the local level is in conflict with the one at the global level. The results show that when local and global information is in conflict, global information must be inhibited to process local information, but that the reverse is not true. This finding has potential direct implications for brain models of visual recognition, by suggesting that when local information is conflicting with global information, inhibitory control reduces feedback activity from global information (e.g., inhibits the forest) which allows the visual system to process local information (e.g., to focus attention on a particular tree).
['Poirel|Nicolas|N|', 'Krakowski|Claire Sara|CS|', 'Sayah|Sabrina|S|', 'Pineau|Arlette|A|', 'Houdé|Olivier|O|', 'Borst|Grégoire|G|']
D000328:Adult D000704:Analysis of Variance D001288:Attention D003220:Conflict, Psychological D005260:Female D064368:Healthy Volunteers D006801:Humans D007266:Inhibition, Psychological D008297:Male D060865:Repetition Priming D014197:Trees D014796:Visual Perception D055815:Young Adult
local processing negative priming compound stimuli inhibition global processing