Attentional requirements in a ‘preattentive’ feature search task

Julian S. Joseph (), Marvin M. Chun and Ken Nakayama
Additional contact information
Julian S. Joseph: University of Nevada
Marvin M. Chun: Yale University
Ken Nakayama: Harvard University

Nature, 1997, vol. 387, issue 6635, 805-807

Abstract: Abstract It is commonly assumed that certain features are so elementary to the visual system that they require no attentional resources to be perceived. Such ‘preattentive’ features are traditionally identified by visual search performance1,2,3, in which the reaction time for detecting a feature difference against a set of distractor items does not increase with the number of distractors. This suggests an unlimited capacity for the perception of such features. We provide evidence to the contrary, demonstrating that detection of differences in a simple feature such as orientation is severely impaired by additionally imposing an attentionally demanding rapid serial visual presentation task involving letter identification. The same visual stimuli exhibit non-increasing reaction time versus set-size functions. These results demonstrate that attention can be critical even for the detection of so-called ‘preattentive’ features.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/42940 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:387:y:1997:i:6635:d:10.1038_42940

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/42940

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().