External noise distinguishes attention mechanisms

Lü, Zhong-Lin; Dosher, Barbara Anne

doi:10.1016/s0042-6989(97)00273-3

Cited by 460 publications

(420 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

392

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In one condition, the duration of these judgments was increased by a stimulus degradation through the addition of a visual noise to the digits displayed on the screen. In line with studies suggesting that stimulus degradation puts special demands on attention (e.g., Heitz & Engle, 2007;Lu & Dosher, 1998), this stimulus degradation should lengthen the capture of attention involved in recognizing and processing each digit and, thus, should have a damaging effect on concurrent maintenance. As we predicted, the longer response times induced by this degradation yielded lower recall performance.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 74%

Working memory in children: A time-constrained functioning similar to adults

Portrat

Camos

Barrouillet

2009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

a b s t r a c tWithin the time-based resource-sharing (TBRS) model, we tested a new conception of the relationships between processing and storage in which the core mechanisms of working memory (WM) are time constrained. However, our previous studies were restricted to adults. The current study aimed at demonstrating that these mechanisms are present and functional before adulthood. For this purpose, we investigated the effect on maintenance of the duration of the attentional capture induced by processing. In two experiments using computer-paced WM span tasks, 10-year-olds were asked to maintain letters while performing spatial location judgments. The duration of this processing was manipulated by varying either the discriminability between target locations or the contrast between targets and background. In both experiments, longer processing times resulted in poorer recall, as we observed previously in adults. These findings suggest that the core mechanisms of WM described by the TBRS model are already settled during childhood.

show abstract

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 74%

Working memory in children: A time-constrained functioning similar to adults

Portrat

Camos

Barrouillet

2009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Therefore, it appears that this kind of search is indeed fundamentally different from the other two kinds tested here (Wolfe, 1998b). Inefficient feature search arises when the system need to accumulate information for a longer period of time in order to distinguish signal from noise (Eckstein, Thomas, Palmer, & Shimozaki, 2000;Lu & Dosher, 1998). In spatial configuration search, however, the inefficiency is in the selection time.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Attention capacity and task difficulty in visual search

2005

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When a visual search task is very difficult (as when a small feature difference defines the target), even detection of a unique element may be substantially slowed by increases in display set size. This has been attributed to the influence of attentional capacity limits. We examined the influence of attentional capacity limits on three kinds of search task: difficult feature search (with a subtle featural difference), difficult conjunction search, and spatial-configuration search. In all 3 tasks, each trial contained sixteen items, divided into two eight-item sets. The two sets were presented either successively or simultaneously. Comparison of accuracy in successive versus simultaneous presentations revealed that attentional capacity limitations are present only in the case of spatialconfiguration search. While the other two types of task were inefficient (as reflected in steep search slopes), no capacity limitations were evident. We conclude that the difficulty of a visual search task affects search efficiency but does not necessarily introduce attentional capacity limits. q

show abstract

“…For example, McElree and Carrasco's [57] work on speed-accuracy tradeoffs or Lu and Dosher's [58] modeling of the effects of external noise.…”

Section: Trends In Cognitive Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving towards solutions to some enduring controversies in visual search

Wolfe

2003

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

243

191

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How do we find a target item in a visual world filled with distractors? A quarter of a century ago, in her influential 'Feature Integration Theory (FIT)', Treisman proposed a two-stage solution to the problem of visual search: a preattentive stage that could process a limited number of basic features in parallel and an attentive stage that could perform more complex acts of recognition, one object at a time. The theory posed a series of problems. What is the nature of that preattentive stage? How do serial and parallel processes interact? How does a search unfold over time? Recent work has shed new light on these issues.Visual search is one of those things we do all day, every day, from finding milk in the refrigerator to locating our car in the car-park. We pay others to do it at airport security checks and in radiology laboratories and, in the past quarter of a century, we have done a great deal of it in our research laboratories. Laboratory search tasks ask the observer to find and/or identify a target item among some number of distractor items. The core empirical fact that needs explanation is that some search tasks are easy and others are difficult (see Fig. 1). We assume that, if we could successfully describe the rules that govern human search behavior, we would be able to improve performance in critical applied search tasks and to offer suggestions to those trying to build machines that might do our search tasks for us. Visual search is also an experimentally tractable way to study selective attention, and it is increasingly clear that any useful theory of visual perception will require an understanding of the role of attention.Treisman's feature integration theory Visual search and the role of attention in search has been much discussed in recent literature (see [1][2][3][4][5] for reviews). This article will concentrate on several issues growing out of Anne Treisman's seminal Feature Integration Theory (FIT) [6]. It would be a great disservice to many other researchers to label FIT as the sole 'big bang' of the visual search universe. However, it does serve well as an organizing principle for a brief review of some interesting and long-running controversies.The original FIT proposed that visual search tasks could be dichotomized into 'preattentive' and 'attentive' categories. Preattentive processing was held to occur in parallel across most or all of the visual field in a single step and to be limited to a small set of basic features like color, size, motion, and orientation. Thus, you could preattentively find a red item among green. Operationally, preattentive search for a target defined by a single basic feature would produce reaction times (RTs) independent of the number of items in the display (set size). Thus, the slope of the function relating RT to set size would be near zero. Other tasks, like a search for a randomly oriented 'T' among 'L's could not be performed preattentively. Attentive processing was presumed to marshal the more extensive perceptual capabilities required to 'bind' features ...

show abstract

External noise distinguishes attention mechanisms

Cited by 460 publications

References 41 publications

Working memory in children: A time-constrained functioning similar to adults

Working memory in children: A time-constrained functioning similar to adults

Attention capacity and task difficulty in visual search

Moving towards solutions to some enduring controversies in visual search

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About