Citation

Kristjánsson A. Iperception 2015; 6(6): 2041669515614670.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, School of Health Sciences, University of Iceland, Iceland.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/2041669515614670

PMID

27551357

Abstract

The visual search paradigm has had an enormous impact in many fields. A theme running through this literature has been the distinction between preattentive and attentive processing, which I refer to as the two-stage assumption. Under this assumption, slopes of set-size and response time are used to determine whether attention is needed for a given task or not. Even though a lot of findings question this two-stage assumption, it still has enormous influence, determining decisions on whether papers are published or research funded. The results described here show that the two-stage assumption leads to very different conclusions about the operation of attention for identical search tasks based only on changes in response (presence/absence versus Go/No-go responses). Slopes are therefore an ambiguous measure of attentional involvement. Overall, the results suggest that the two-stage model cannot explain all findings on visual search, and they highlight how slopes of response time and set-size should only be used with caution.

Language: en