the object as a whole. Neural correlates Associations with the early visual cortex Mϋller and Kleinschmidt (2003) looked at the early retinotopic visual areas to see if they play a role in object-based attention. They found that when an individual focused on a spatial cued there was retinotopic activity in the V1, V2, V3 and V4 areas that represented locations outside the cued region, suggesting that information from these regions is also being processed. These regions were however enhanced when these locations were bound to the cued area by a common object that extended beyond the originally cued region. This finding could support the argument for sensory enhancement, as the attention of the individual was extending to the boundaries of the object. They also found that the neural responses in these early visual regions where controlled by these object-based effects. Neuropsychological findings: a case study Patient D.F. has defined bilateral lesions to the lateral occipital (LO) areas of her brain. She presented with normal covert spatial attention and thus could mentally focus on a specific sensory stimuli. However, when her spatial attention was tested it was found that when she focused her attention selectively during a task, she was not sensitive to the presentation of objects. The results of the study by de-Wir, Kentridge and Milner (2009) found that although the basic figure-ground segmentation was not effected in D.F., she was still unable to influence the spread of her attentional resources over an object as a whole. This resulted in her having a fragmented representation of the object that was present in the area she had focused her attention, whereas an individual with normal object-based attention processing should have a complete representation due to sensory enhancement. The lack of any object-based effects in tasks could therefore suggest that the LO region plays a key role in object-based attention. Alternate mechanisms that could modulate object-based attention Two alternate mechanisms have been proposed, in addition to sensory enhancement, to modulate object-based attention: attentional prioritization and attentional shifting. Attentional prioritization Unlike sensory enhancement, attentional prioritization suggests that the order in which spatial locations or objects are scanned during a visual search will influence how well they are processed. In the case of a cued object, attention by default will be deployed to the object and processing will begin within the attended object and thus later recall of the objects qualities will be relatively