Attention in Visual Search: Distinguishing Four Causes of a Set-Size Effect

Current Directions in Psychological Science

Volumn 4, Issue 4, 1995, Pages 118-123

  Palmer, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972621044     PISSN: 09637214     EISSN: 14678721     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8721.ep10772534     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. D.E. Broadbent, Perception and Communication (Pergamon Press, London, 1958).
2. For a more recent review of the attention literature, see G. Sperling and B.A. Dosher, Strategy and optimization in human information processing, in Handbook of Perception and Human Performance, K.R. Boff, L. Kaufman, and J.P. Thomas, Eds. (Wiley, New York, 1986).
3. J. Palmer, C.T. Ames, and D.T. Lindsey, Measuring the effect of attention on simple visual search, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 19, 108–130 (1993).
4. J. Palmer, Set-size effects in visual search: The effect of attention is independent of the stimulus for simple tasks, Vision Research, 34. 1703–1721 (1994).
5. J. Duncan and G. Humphreys, Visual search and stimulus similarity. Psychological Review, 96, 433–458 (1989);
6. H. Pashler, Target-distractor dis-criminability in visual search, Perception & Psycho-physics, 41, 285–292 (1987).
7. M.L. Shaw, Attending to multiple sources of information, Cognitive Psychology, 14, 353–409 (1982);
8. M.L. Shaw, Division of attention among spatial locations; A fundamental difference between detection of letters and detection of luminance increments, in Attention & Performance X, H. Bouma and D.G. Bouwhais, Eds. (Erlbaum, Hillsdale. NJ, 1984);
9. for contrasting results, see P.J. Bennett and P.D. Jaye, Letter localization, not discrimination, is constrained by attention, Canadian journal of Experimental Psychology (in press).
10. For more general models, see N. Graham, P. Kramer, and D. Yager, Signal-detection models for multidimensional stimuli: Probability distributions and combination rules, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 31, 366–409 (1987).
11. M.I. Posner, C.R.R. Snyder, and B.J. Davidson, Attention and the detection of signals, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 109, 160–174 (1980).
12. Shaw (1984), note 5.
13. A. Treisman and G. Gelade, A feature-integration theory of attention, Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97–136 (1980);
14. D. Aiken and J. Palmer, Pursuing an alternative theory of the difference between conjunctions and disjunctions in visual search, unpublished manuscript, University of Washington, Seattle.
15. M. Pavel, A statistical model of preattentive visual search, paper presented at the meeting of the Psychonomie Society, New Orleans (November 1990);
16. J. Palmer, Visual search latency: The influence of target-distractor discriminability on the magnitude of set-size effects, paper presented at the meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Sarasota, FL (May 1994) (transcript available from the author).
17. W.S. Geisler and K.L. Chou, The separation of low-level and high-level factors in complex tasks: Visual search, Psychological Review, 102, 356–378 (1995).