Abstract
Kristjansson (2015) suggests that standard research methods in the study of visual search should be “reconsidered.” He reiterates a useful warning against treating reaction time x set size functions as simple metrics that can be used to label search tasks as “serial” or “parallel.” However, I argue that he goes too far with a broad attack on the use of slopes in the study of visual search. Used wisely, slopes do provide us with insight into the mechanisms of visual search.
Highlights
Standard visual experiments ask observers to detect the presence or absence of a target item among some number of distractors
While it is worth reminding the field that there has been progress since 1980, Kristjansson (2015) wants to throw out a whole set of scientifically useful ‘‘babies’’ with this outdated, two-stage ‘‘bathwater.’’ The purpose of my short piece is to argue that the basic visual search paradigm continues to be useful and that Reaction times (RTs) Â set size functions continue to be interpretable
The idea of an autonomous ‘‘preattentive’’ piece of the visual system may be dangerous and wrong, but preattentive processing is a meaningful part of any theory of visual attention
Summary
The idea of an autonomous ‘‘preattentive’’ piece of the visual system may be dangerous and wrong, but preattentive processing is a meaningful part of any theory of visual attention. When a new scene is presented to an observer, some regions and objects will not yet have been selected and, will not have been subject to the effects of visual selective attention. If those objects are being processed at all—which, they are—that processing is, tautologically, ‘‘preattentive.’’ If something is seen in regions that have not yet been attended—and, something is seen there, we can talk about ‘‘preattentive vision.’’ The nature of that preattentive processing and the contents of preattentive visual representations are open for investigation (Wolfe & Bennett, 1997) as is the relationship of preattentive to ‘‘postattentive’’ vision (Wolfe, Klempen, & Dahlen, 2000). Reentrant or feedback signals will modify the activity in V1 and the same piece of cortex will be contributing to the attentive representation of the same item
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