Abstract
The task of scanning a visual display to identify certain symbols may involve ignoring the presence of others, and so may be compared with Donders's 1862 study of the ‘c‐reaction’, in which a response was required to only one of a set of five possible phonemes presented to a subject in random succession. For visual displays of letters of the alphabet the time required to ignore a symbol as irrelevant is shown to depend upon the vocabulary of items for which search is conducted. Incidental learning of irrelevant symbols is shown to be related to the same variable. It is shown that performance in situations of this type is analogous to that in which subjects respond to groups of stimuli rather than to particular items, and stimulus and response entropy are independently varied.
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