RESEARCH ARTICLE Statistical Properties Demand as Much Attention as Object Features

Recent studies have argued that the statistical properties of a set of visual items can be extracted with little or even no cost. In the present study, observers (N = 188) performed a color task and an orientation task, and the attention effect was measured as the advantage of pre-cueing one of the two tasks. The color and orientation tasks required participants to report either an object feature or the mean of a 4×4 array (i.e., statistical property). The pre-cueing advantages were approximately equal regardless of the nature of the tasks (object features vs. statistical properties), providing evidence that statistical properties are not per-ceived with zero cost, but demand as much attention as object features