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Attentional requirements in a ‘preattentive’ feature search task

Nature volume 387, pages 805–807 (1997)Cite this article

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that certain features are so elementary to the visual system that they require no attentional resources to be perceived. Such ‘preattentive’ features are traditionally identified by visual search performance1,2,3, in which the reaction time for detecting a feature difference against a set of distractor items does not increase with the number of distractors. This suggests an unlimited capacity for the perception of such features. We provide evidence to the contrary, demonstrating that detection of differences in a simple feature such as orientation is severely impaired by additionally imposing an attentionally demanding rapid serial visual presentation task involving letter identification. The same visual stimuli exhibit non-increasing reaction time versus set-size functions. These results demonstrate that attention can be critical even for the detection of so-called ‘preattentive’ features.

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Figure 1: Schematic of visual stimuli.
Figure 2: Percentage correct in the orientation oddball detection for the single-task (oddball detection only) and dual-task (letter identifi. cation and oddball detection) conditions as a function of the lag between the onsets of the target letter and the orientation array.
Figure 3: To check that the standard experimental signature of a preattentively perceived attribute was exhibited by our stimuli, we measured. the detection reaction time as a function of the number of items in the display.
Figure 4: a, Two-dimensional array of oriented Gabor items used to demonstrate that similar performance impairments occur in the perce. ption of this type of orientation difference.
Figure 5: a, Two-dimensional array of oriented Gabor items used to demonstrate that similar performance impairments occur in the perception of this type of orientation difference.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the University of Nevada, Reno College of Arts and Science (J.S.J.), NIH (J.S.J., M.M.C.), and AFOSR (K.N.) and the McKnight Foundation (K.N.). We thank P. Cavanagh and J. M. Wolfe for helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. *Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, 89557, Nevada, USA

    Julian S. Joseph

  2. †Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, 06520, Connecticut, USA

    Marvin M. Chun

  3. ‡Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Ken Nakayama

  4. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to J.S.J.,

    Julian S. Joseph

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  1. Julian S. Joseph
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Correspondence to Julian S. Joseph.

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Joseph, J., Chun, M. & Nakayama, K. Attentional requirements in a ‘preattentive’ feature search task. Nature 387, 805–807 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/42940

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