A response time cost when different representations of an attended object are integrated.

When selected, attention is thought to spread across the whole of an object. Such spreading is thought to occur via the integration and mutual enhancement of the different mental representations of said object. Neurophysiological studies have demonstrated that such integration is not instantaneous with selection, but rather occurs after some delay. It is currently unclear whether the time needed for integration to be established has a behavioural consequence. Here, it was found that trials that required integration were responded to more slowly than those that did not, even though correct responses in both could be determined by the same information. These data thus suggest that the time taken for integration between representations to be established has a consequence on behaviour, one that can be observed as a response time cost. Furthermore, these findings enlighten the time-course of integration vis-a-vis the processing of information at different levels of the processing stream.