Abstract
Two experiments are reported in which observers had to utilize information from one of two structural levels of visual stimulus patterns (large letters composed of smaller ones). They could utilize information more rapidly form one level only at the cost of slower utilization from the other. This trade off defines an empirical attention operating characteristic (AOC) which is consistent with a simple mathematical model of the perceptual process: when viewing a stimulus, the observer selects one of two alternative “attentional” strategies, where each strategy is optimal for utilizing information from one structural level, but less than optimal for the other.
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Kinchla, R.An attention operating characteristic in vision (Tech. Rep. 29). Hamilton, Ontario, Department of Psychology, McMaster University, 1969.
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This work was supported under NSF Grant BNS 80-04649 held by the senior author, and was reported earlier in a paper presented at the 1979 meeting of the Psychonomic Society in San Antonio, Texas.
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Kinchla, R.A., Solis-Macias, V. & Hoffman, J. Attending to different levels of structure in a visual image. Perception & Psychophysics 33, 1–10 (1983). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205860
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205860