Discrimination of Successiveness: A Test of a Model of Attention

Schmidt, Marianne W.; Kristofferson, Alfred B.

doi:10.1126/science.139.3550.112

Cited by 26 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Or, if the target was identified, the probability would be lower that the +1 item would also be identified. The existence of such a "gating" operation (D. E. Broadbent & M. E. Broadbent, 1986;Reeves & Sperling, 1986;Schmidt & Kristofferson, 1963;Sperling & Reeves, 1980) further complicates the interpretation of pre-and postintrusion errors in tenns of serial versus parallel processing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Filtering versus parallel processing in RSVP tasks

Botella

Eriksen

1992

Perception & Psychophysics

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An experiment of McLean, D. E. Broadbent, and M. H. P. Broadbent (1983) using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) was replicated. A series of letters in one of 5 colors was presented, and the subject was asked to identify the letter that appeared in a designated color. There were several innovations in our procedure, the most important ofwhich was the use of a response menu. After each trial, the subject was presented with 7 candidate letters from which to choose hislher response. In three experimental conditions, the target, the letter following the target, and all letters other than the target were, respectively, eliminated from the menu. In other conditions, the stimulus list was manipulated by repeating items in the series, repeating the color of successive items, or even eliminating the target color. By means of these manipulations, we were able to determine more precisely the information that subjects had obtained from the presentation of the stimulus series. Although we replicated the results of McLean et a1. (1983), the more extensive information that our procedure produced was incompatible with the serial filter model that McLean et a1. had used to describe their data. Overall, our results were more compatible with a parallel-processing account. Furthermore, intrusion errors are apparently not only a perceptual phenomenon but a memory problem as well.The term illusory conjunction has come to be used to designate errors that result from incorrectly combining correctly perceived features of visual stimuli (e.g., Nissen, 1985; Prinzmetal & Millis-Wright, 1984;Treisman, 1988;Treisman & Gelade, 1980;Treisman & Schmidt, 1982;Tsal, 1989). Although the illusory conjunctions have generally been produced by presenting the stimuli simultaneously, this phenomenon of feature exchange apparently is also found when the stimuli are presented successively, as in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Lawrence (1971) was the first to report the basic phenomena of perceptual distortion with RSVP and the first to analyze the errors in terms of the temporal distance between the target and the error. He presented words at a very high rate, but at a single spatial location, and asked subjects to report the identity of the only uppercase word in the series. The most frequent errors were intrusions (when the word given as the response was one that appeared in the series but not in uppercase), and the most frequent kind of intrusion was the reporting of the word immediately following the target. The feature •'uppercase" is incorrectly conjoined with a correctly perceived

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Filtering versus parallel processing in RSVP tasks

Botella

Eriksen

1992

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Schurman (I972) has made a related point. He has noted the minimum point on V-shaped masking functions and the just noticeable difference for temporal asynchrony judgments (Schmidt & Kristofferson, 1963) typically are both around 25·50 msec, Between 25 and 50 msec, absolute and comparative judgment strategies are likely to overlap. The S would fail to discriminate the asynchrony and employ a comparative judgment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metacontrast and brightness discrimination

Bernsteint

Proctor

et al. 1973

Perception & Psychophysics

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An attempt was made to obtain Ll-shaped masking functions in two metacontrast experiments. Trained Ss judged whether a square test stimulus (TS) was bright or dim. The TS was presented alone or in conjunction with an adjacent pair of square masking stimuli (MS) whose energy equaled the bright TS. The stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) ranged from 0 to 125 msec. The task minimized the role of apparent movement cues as a reliable basis for judgment. Similar studies have employed TS plus MS vs MS alone as the alternatives, allowing apparent movement to be a cue. Brightness accuracy was a If-shaped function of SOA. This finding is consistent with neural-net models (Weisstein, 1968). However, analysis of Ss' response bias suggested an alternative explanation involving the MS as a comparison stimulus at short SOA. It was concluded that U-shaped masking functions are also consistent with theories based upon independent component processes, e.g., Schurman and Eriksen (1970) and Uttal (1970).Metacontrast refers to a performance decrement or a decrease in phenomenonal brightness of a test stimulus (TS) produced by an adjacent but nonoverlapping masking stimulus (MS) presented concurrently or shortly after TS. The term "masking function" describes the relationship between the response measure and the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) separating TS onset from MS onset. These masking functions typically are at a minimum at O-msec SOA (concurrent TS-MS onset) and increase monotonically to the control level (TS alone) between 100-and 200-msec SOA. However, U-shaped functions with minima at 25-to 50-msec SOA have also been reported. The conditions giving rise to this phenomenon are quite controversial. Equal TS and MS energies seem a necessary (Weisstein, 1968) but not sufficient condition (Schurman, 1972;Schiller & Smith, 1966) for U-shaped masking.Schurman (1972) has described two groups of investigators who have been in conflict over If-shaped masking. One group is represented by Weisstein (1968) and Haber (1970), among others, They tend to define perception in phenomenological terms and to use brightness matching and magnitude estimation measures in their most recent metacontrast studies. Conceptually, they view metacontrast as a unitary phenomenon. Weisstein's (1968) elegant neural-net model, based upon principles of lateral inhibition, typifies this approach. She attempts to demonstrate how differences between U-shaped and monotonic masking functions are the

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“…Memory does not contribute to the central decision, because the information fed by each input channel to the decision mechanism consists of only a single time value--the arrival time. Attention influences temporal order judgments (the law of prior entry; Stone, 1926;Titchener, 1908) either by speeding peripheral processing of the attended stimulus (Sternberg & Knoll, 1973) or by determining when information in sensory storage is to be sampled by the decision mechanism (Schmidt & Kristofferson, 1963).…”

Section: Temporal Order Judgments (Tojs)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention gating in short-term visual memory.

Reeves¹,

Sperling²

1986

Psychological Review

417

359

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Subjects first detected a target embedded in a stream of letters presented at the left of fixation and then, as quickly as possible, shifted their attention to a stream of numerals at the right of fixation. They attempted to report, in order, the four earliest occurring numerals after the target. Numerals appeared at rates of 4.6, 6.9, 9.2, and 13.4/s. Scaling analyses were made of(a) item scores, P~(r), the probability of a numeral from stimulus position i appearing in response position r, r = (1, 2, 3, 4), and (b) order scores, P~nj, the probability that a numeral from stimulus position i appeared earlier in the response than one from stimulus position j. For all subjects, targets, and numeral rates, the relative position of numerals in the response sequence showed clustering, disorder, and folding. Reported numerals tended to cluster around a stimulus position 400 ms after the target. The numerals were reported in an apparently haphazard order--at high numeral rates, inverted iBj pairs were as frequent as correct pairs. The actual order of report resulted from a mixture of correctly ordered numerals with numerals ordered in the direction opposite to their order of presentation (folding around the cluster center). These results are quantitatively described by a strength theory of order (precedence) and are efficiently predicted by a computational attention gating model (AGM). The AGM makes quantitatively correct predictions of over 500 values ofPl(r), P~Bj in 12 conditions with two attention and three to six detection parameters estimated for each subject. The AGM may be derived from a more general attention model that assumes (a) after detection of the target an attention gate opens briefly (with a bell-shaped time course) to allow numerals to enter a visual short-term memory, and (b) subsequent order of report depends on both item strength (how wide the gate was open during the numeral's entry) and on order information (item strength times cumulative strength of prior numerals).When an observer receives information from two or more distinct sources at once and is unable to process all of them, the observer may allocate processing capacity first to one source and then to another. We term such a transfer of processing capacity a shift of attention, although we do not imply that conscious awareness of the shift must occur. A classical example concerns a fistener at a cocktail party who attempts to listen simultaneously to two different conversations. If the listener is unable to process both conversations at once, the listener may pay attention first to one conversation and then shift attention to the other (Broadbent, 1958;Cherry, 1953). Our present research concerns an observer's ability to shift focal attention (Kahneman, 1973) between two sources of visual input.In studying visual attention, we used the RSVP attention shift paradigm

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Discrimination of Successiveness: A Test of a Model of Attention

Cited by 26 publications

References 4 publications

Filtering versus parallel processing in RSVP tasks

Filtering versus parallel processing in RSVP tasks

Metacontrast and brightness discrimination

Attention gating in short-term visual memory.

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