Chapter 1. Serial vs. Parallel Processing

1.1 Introduction

This experiment is a replication of an experiment conducted by Treisman and Gelade (1981). Anne Treisman is known for her work on the topic of attention. She formulated the feature integration theory (FIT) of attention. In this theory she states that the perception of features of a stimulus occurs automatically, while configural processing (processing the entirety of a stimulus) can occur only when the viewer is fully attending to it. In this experiment, Treisman and Gelade (1981) demonstrated what can happen if a person’s attention is divided by an additional task. Their participants made a specific type of error, called illusory conjunctions, when their attention was divided. The term refers to erroneous re-combinations of features encountered in various stimuli. This evidence provided strong support for FIT.

Treisman, A. M., & Gelade, G. A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136.

Treisman, A. M., & Schmidt, H. (1983). Illusory conjunctions in the perception of objects. Cognitive Psychology,14(1), 107-141.

Treisman, A. M., & Sato, S. (1990). Conjunction search revisited. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,16, 459-478.

1.2 Experiment Setup

1.3 Instructions

You will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. At the beginning of each trial, an array of letters will appear for 20 seconds. Please search the array for the stimulus that is uniquely different from the others in the array. If the target is present press the Z key or click the ‘Target present’ button below the array. If the target is not present click the M key or click the ‘Target not present’ button.

Keyboard Responses

1.4 Experiment

1.5 Results

1.6 Quiz