Selective attention as tuning: the case of stroke weight

It has long been demonstrated that when grouping occurs, attention transfer between grouped elements is facilitated, as compared with attention transfer between elements-similarly distant-that are not grouped. This has been shown for grouping by connectedness, by orientation, and by color. The present article extends these findings to the case of similarity in coarseness. By using spatial cuing to elements drawn with different strokes, it is shown that the visual processing of elements that sharestroke heaviness with the cued element is more efficient than that of elements that do not. Three experiments, in which cue validity regarding the target's location and/or its stroke is manipulated, show that the facilitation has both an endogenous and an exogenous component. The findings are discussed in terms of visual tuning to the features of a stimulus, with tuning being the initial stage of visual processing required for identification and discrimination. It is proposed that grouping, rather than explaining the facilitation observed, can be explained by the notion of visual tuning to features. The findings also point to potential methodological pitfalls when different stroke weights are used, unintentionally, in visual displays.