Attention, perception, and feature singletons: The effect of attentional pop-out on feature discriminabilities
Abstract
The perception of items that are readily located among distractor items, due to a unique feature, was explored. In a series of 5 experiments a novel methodology was used, drawn from both the visual search and location-cueing literatures, to examine feature discriminations for various aspects of the display items (i.e., color and orientation). Experiment 1 determined that feature discriminations performed on the dimension containing the unique feature was enhanced relative to discriminations of other features of the target item. This finding was termed the "within-dimension advantage". The remaining experiments explored the genesis of this effect. Experiment 2 failed to find support for the hypothesis that this effect was due to certain strategies that the observer might adopt. Experiment 3 found minimal support for a hypothesis concerning the location information provided by each dimension. Experiments 4 and 5 showed that the decreased discrimination performance for non-unique features of the target was due to competition at a decisional level from the surrounding distractors. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to other findings in the spatial attention literature.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Melara, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Psychology|Experiments|Cognitive therapy
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