PSYCH 120A Chapter Notes - Chapter ZAPS 4-6: Stephen Kosslyn, Feature Integration Theory, Attentional Blink
Document Summary
Filter theory (broadbent): selective nature of our attention/conscious awareness. Brain is continually bombarded with more visual sights and sensory info than can be conscious at once; mind automatically screens/filters to let in the important. Salient feature: used to selectively ignore surrounding distractors. Selective attention filters enable us to make more automatic decisions about stimuli among us during visual search. Feature search task: search for single feature that distinguished target from all distractors. Conjunction search task: no one figure distinguished the target from the distractors; forced to search for a conjunction of two features. Feature integration theory (anne treisman): we begin a visual search by automatically identifying primitive features (color, shape, size, movement) within an environment. Our mind uses separate systems to analyze different visual features of objects at the same time (parallel processing) Preattentive processing: searching for a single stimulus happens fast and automatically. Target is salient so it seemed to pop out regardless of the # of distractors.
