THE ROLE OF REDUNDANCY IN THE OBJECT-LINE EFFECT

Subjects'' identification of briefly presented target lines can sometimes be facilitated by including noninformative lines of context in the display (the object-line effect). Previous explanations for this effect claimed that stimulus properties such as 3-dimensionality, connectedness, structural relevance, line-masking or fixation-point detail allow line-in-context stimuli to be processed more efficiently than single-line stimuli. Instead of postulating special processing consequences for these stimulus properties, 2 general preconditions for the object-line effect are proposed. Three experiments demonstrate that the effect occurs when lines-in-context have perceptual attributes that are correlated with the target lines and when the lines-in-context are perceptually more dissimilar from one another than the single target lines.