Citation

Treisman A, Souther J. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 1986; 12(1): 3-17.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1986, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

2939189

Abstract

When attention is divided among four briefly exposed syllables, subjects mistakenly detect targets whose letters are present in the display but in the wrong combinations. These illusory conjunctions are somewhat more frequent when the target is a word and when the distractors are nonwords, but the effects of lexical status are small, and no longer reach significance in free report of the same displays. Search performance is further impaired if the nonwords are unpronounceable consonant strings rather than consonant-vowel-consonant strings, but the decrement is due to missed targets rather than to increased conjunction errors. The results are discussed in relation to feature-integration theory and to current models of word perception.

Language: en