Citation

Kleiss JA, Lane DM. Proc. Hum. Factors Ergon. Soc. Annu. Meet. 1984; 28(4): 379.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1984, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/154193128402800420

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Shiffrin and Schneider (1977) concluded that after consistent practice with a detection task in which target and distractor stimuli are never interchanged over trials, subjects are able to search for any of four targets in displays containing four stimuli almost as well as they can search for a single target in displays containing only one stimulus. According to Shiffrin and Schneider, practice leads to the development of automatic attention responses such that when a target appears in a display, attention is automatically and involuntarily drawn to the target thereby bypassing both the display search and the memory search processes. A stimulus, however, could conceivably "call forth" an automatic attention response on the basis of either higher-order information such as its name or lower-order information such as its visual characteristics. Shiffrin and his colleagues (e.g., Shiffrin & Gardner, 1972) have for many years taken the view that stimuli are processed fairly extensively in parallel and without attention. Given this view, automatic attention responses would be elicited by higher-order information. Treisman and Gelade (1980), however, suggest that subjects may learn a disjunct set of features which distinguish targets from distractors. Given this view, automatic attention responses would be elicited by lower-order visual characteristics of the stimuli. The present research was designed to test these two possibilities.

Language: en