Filtering versus parallel processing in RSVP tasks

Abstract

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

Priming effects in attentional gating

“…The idea that the identity of several items other than the target in the RSVP stream is available is supported by studies requiring the identification of either one or two targets (Botella & Eriksen, 1992;Chun, Bromberg, & Potter, 1994). In an experiment by Botella and Eriksen, participants were required to indicate the identity of a target letter appearing in a specific color by choosing from a list of response alternatives presented at the end of the trial.…”

Direct selection by color for visual encoding

“…Other studies have shown that participants can reliably pick out a target stimulus defined by color when it is presented in a rapid sequence of superimposed stimuli (rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP, task; Botella & Eriksen, 1992;Chun, 1997;Folk, Leber, & Egeth, 2002;McLean, Broadbent, & Broadbent, 1983). Clearly, in these paradigms, the participants were able to select objects for report on the basis of color.…”

Temporal binding errors are redistributed by the attentional blink

“…Before discussing previous results on illusory conjunctions in RSVP tasks, I introduce here some terminology adopted from Botella and Eriksen (1992). In a search for a colored target letter appearing among non-colored letter distractors, the color feature defining the target to be reported is the key feature, while the identity of the…”

“…The patterns of these intrusion errors have been used to infer the processes involved in target performance in RSVP tasks. Different patterns might either reflect different processing strategies employed by the observer (Gathercole & Broadbent, 1984;McLean et al, 1983) or reflect different relative processing times for the independent features involved (Botella & Eriksen, 1992). For instance, a postpattern result may result from the use of an active detect-then-identify search strategy which hypothesizes that processing resources "are devoted to the interrogation ofthe target-defining code to the exclusion ofthe to-be-reported code until a target detection is made" (McLean et al, 1983, p. 184).…”

“…More recently, Botella and Eriksen (1992) have argued that rather than postulate different processing strategies, a single parallel processing account could account for all three patterns of intrusion errors on the basis of relative processing times for each ofthe independent features involved as well as the amount of attention allocated to each feature dimension (Botella, 1992). Botella and his colleagues have presented several findings that argue against the need for postulating different processing strategies.…”