Fig. 3

Illustration of stimulus pairs in the complete composite paradigm and trial sequences. In (a), it shows the four conditions used in the paradigm; the attended components are shaded in grey. In (b), a 1000 ms central fixation cross precedes each trial, followed by a cue either below or above the cross, or to the left or right of the cross, to indicate which halves (top or bottom/left or right) of the characters participants should attend to in the subsequent display. The complete composite paradigm (Gauthier & Bukach, 2007) was adopted so that in congruent trials, the attended and irrelevant/unattended halves corresponded to the same response (i.e. both were the same or both were different); by contrast, in incongruent trials, the attended and irrelevant/unattended halves would correspond to different judgments (e.g. the top halves were the same, while the bottom halves were different). We adopted this paradigm to avoid response biases that may occur in the partial composite design where the irrelevant/unattended halves are always different (Richler et al., 2011; Robbins & McKone, 2007)