The present thesis has described a body of work which has examined the relationship between space-based and feature-based attention in perception and working memory. In some circumstances, space-defined and feature-defined targets have been found to be attentionally selected in similar manners, suggesting that spatial information may be regarded as simply one of many possible feature dimensions that can be employed by attentional guidance processes. However, other findings in this thesis have revealed important differences in terms of template preparation processes and target selection efficiency between spatial and feature-based attention tasks. Future studies could systematically examine the contexts in which spatial templates differ from featural templates. For example, it is intriguing that spatial-configural properties influence the attentional selection of shape-shape conjunction targets (Chapter 4) but not the selection of colour-colour conjunction targets (Berggren & Eimer, 2016b), Given that the spatial relationship between component shapes that are parts of a compound shape object are a crucial component of the spatial definition of this object, whereas colour information has no inherent spatial qualities, it is possible that spatial- configural information can be employed by attentional guidance only for feature dimensions with essential spatial properties. Future studies could examine other features with the expectation that attention to those with intrinsic spatial characteristics like orientation and size would be guided by configuration whilst features without such intrinsic properties like luminance and texture would not be guided by configural information.
Another direction for future work would be to examine the qualitative differences between space-based and feature-based perceptual attention and working memory with other methodologies. Whilst this thesis illuminates key delineations between attention for spatial and featural templates, it is not possible to reliably determine the relative cortical sources of associated electrophysiological activity, due to the spatial limitations of the EEG methods employed here. The present studies have exclusively used EEG caps with only 32 electrodes. It is possible that a denser spatial sampling of EEG signals could yield more precise topographies of space-based and feature-based attentional effects and also reveal subtle topographic differences. Furthermore, due to the inherently poor source localization of EEG, future studies should use fMRI or MEG to investigate the relative origins of these two types of attention. An alternative EEG-based method that might be useful for revealing potential difference between feature-based and space-based attention is multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA; see Fahrenfort et al., 2017), which can take into account signals from multiple channels simultaneously, and may therefore be more sensitive to small differences between these two types of attentional control than standard univariate ERP markers.
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