Abstract
Duncan, Ward, and Shapiro (1994) estimated that attention must remain focused on an object for several hundred milliseconds before being shifted to another object, and they referred to this period as theattentional dwell time. An important implication of these long estimates of the dwell time for models of visual search is that the search process must not involve an item-by-item serial scanning mechanism. If it did, then searching through an array of items would require enormous amounts of time, which—based on data from visual search experiments—it does not. The present report, however, provides evidence that the long estimates of attentional dwell time were caused, at least in part, by the use of masked targets. Implications of these variable estimates of the attentional dwell time for models of visual search are discussed.
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This research was supported by NIH Grant 5 T32 MH18215 awarded to the Department of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University, Grant 95-38 from the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience awarded to S.J.L, and NSF Grant SBR-9319356 awarded to H.E. Thanks are extended to John Duncan, Rich Schweickert, Jim Townsend, and Jeremy Wolfe for providing helpful comments on a previous draft.
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Moore, C.M., Egeth, H., Berglan, L.R. et al. Are attentional dwell times inconsistent with serial visual search?. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 3, 360–365 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210761
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210761