Is recognition accuracy really impaired when the target is repeated in the display?

101

121

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

The effect of flanking context on visual classification: The joint contribution of interactions at different processing levels

Flowers

Wilcox

1982

101

121

“…The strongest support for feature-specific inhibition was a repeated-letter inferiority effect obtained by Bjork and Murray (1977) in a postcuing task. However, subsequent studies have shown convincingly that their results were due to experimental artifacts (C. W. Eriksen, Morris, Yeh, O'Hara, & Durst, 1981;Estes, 1982;Santee & Egeth, 1980. Second, as noted previously, the studies that used stimuli from only a single alphanumeric category have found identical-noise trials to have a small advantage relative to compatible-noise trials, rather than a disadvantage (B.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeated-stimulus superiority and inferiority effects in the identification of letters and digits

Proctor

Fober

1985

When a target stimulus in a predesignated location is identified by a keypress response, responses are slightly faster if noise stimuli in adjacent locations are identical to the target than if they are a different stimulus assigned to the same response (a repeated-stimulus superiority effect). An exception to this result has been found in experiments that used randomly intermixed letter and digit stimuli. These experiments showed slower responding for identical noise than for nonidentical, response-compatible noise (a repeated-stimulus inferiority effect). The present study investigated these phenomena in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 established that both the superiority and inferiority effects can be obtained in the same experiment. They also provided evidence that the repeated-stimulus inferiority effect is a function of the intermixing of letters and digits and not of the larger target-set size that has been used for mixed lists. Experiment 3 demonstrated that, with unmixed presentation, the repeated-stimulus superiority effect is enhanced by an increase in the number of stimuli assigned to each response. The experiments are consistent with accounts that attribute the repeated-stimulus superiority effect to competition that occurs when different internal recognition responses are activated. Moreover, the experiments suggest that the repeated-stimulus inferiority effect has its basis in processes that occur subsequent to feature extraction.

“…For related results and discussion, see Bjork and Murray (1977), C. W. Eriksen and B. A. Eriksen (1979), C. W. Eriksen, Morris, Yeh, O'Hara, and Durst (1981), Krueger and Shapiro (1980), and Egeth (1980, 1982).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Color segregation and selective attention in a nonsearch task

Harms¹,

Bundesen²

1983

116

121

Relations between selective attention and perceptual segregation by color were investigated in binary-choice reaction time experiments based on the nonsearch paradigm of Eriksen and Eriksen (1974). In focused attention conditions (Experiment 1), noise letters flanking a central target letter caused less interference when they differed from the target in color, although color carried no information as to whether or not a letter was the target. When blocking of trials favored a strategy of dividing attention between target and noise letters (Experiment 2), no benefit accrued from difference between target color and noise color. The results supported an attentional interpretation of the effect of color demonstrated in Experiment 1, implying that perceptual segregation by color improved the efficiency of focusing attention on the target.Recent studies have demonstrated remarkable deficits in subjects' abilities to control their visual information processing by focusing attention on stimuli in a prespecified spatial location (cf. Egeth, 1977; C. W. Eriksen & Schultz, 1979;Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). A binary-choice reaction time experiment by B. A. Eriksen and C. W. Eriksen (1974) provides a good example. Subjects were presented with displays in which a central target letter appeared alone or flanked by a number of noise letters. The target was always presented directly above the fixation point, and the required response was uncorrelated with the number and type (response compatible, incompatible, or neutral) of noise letters. For all types of noise, reaction time increased as between-letter spacing decreased, but interference was stronger with response-incompatible than with neutral noise and stronger with neutral than with responsecompatible noise. Eriksen and Eriksen concluded that the subject "cannot prevent processing of noise letters occurring within about 1 deg of the target due to the nature of processing channel capacity and must inhibit his response until he is able to discriminate exactly which letter is in the target position" (p. 143).