Discriminability of differences in line slope and in line arrangement as a function of mask delay

Beck, Jacob; Ambler, Bruce A.

doi:10.3758/bf03212838

Cited by 75 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The sensory sensitivity changes produced in this study by attentional manipulation clearly refute these findings and add to contradictory evidence provided by other investigators (e.g., Beck & Ambler, 1972;Posner et al, 1978, Note 4). Beck and Ambler (1972) have suggested that the procedure in the Shiffrin and Gardner (1972) study may have precluded the operation of selective attention. In this experiment, a letter identification and localization task was compared in sequential and simultaneous conditions.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 51%

“…However, in their third experiment, the sequential stimuli were presented as a pair and compared with the presentation of four simultaneous stimuli. Beck and Ambler (1972) suggest that, under experimental conditions, a subject may be able to process two and four spatial locations with equal efficiency, thus accounting for the lack of discrepancy. Shiffrin (1975) reports similar findings using a choice detection task with d' as the major dependent variable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Enhancement of perceptual sensitivity as the result of selectively attending to spatial locations

Bashinski

Bacharach

1980

Perception & Psychophysics

441

296

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The present experiment employed a visual signal-detection task within a cost-benefit (inhibitionfacilitation) paradigm to examine the effects of selective attention on perceptual sensitivity. A central cue directed the subjects' attention to either a right or a left spatial location where a detection task was performed. The cue was either a high/low or neutral-validity indicator of the position in which an event was likely to occur. A rating-scale response scheme in conjunction with the subjects' target signallocational judgments allowed for the construction of ROC curves for each condition. Significant benefits were found for all subjects, supporting the hypothesis that selective attention can enhance perceptual sensitivity. Deallocation of attention resulted in an inhibition of sensitivity in unattended spatial locations. Subjects were consistently most sensitive in the right spatial location. There were no significant differences in overall response bias among the three conditions or in spatial locations. The results support theories of attention, such as "perceptual tuning," that suggest very early selective control.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 51%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancement of perceptual sensitivity as the result of selectively attending to spatial locations

Bashinski

Bacharach

1980

Perception & Psychophysics

441

296

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“…In a number of studies, Beck (1972;Beck & Ambler, 1972 has pointed out the special role of "focal" and "distributed" attention in peripheral viewing; similar considerations almost certainly apply here, although with 1.4° eccentricity the present stimuli were within the central fovea. The properties revealed by Beck for peripheral form discrimination under uncertainty show performance dominated by extremely coarse discrete encodings: Orientation rather than configuration is the decisive factor in discrimination of simple arrangements of line stimuli.…”

Section: Two Modes Of Visual Pattern Processingmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…In this experiment, the number of curved lines in each display was reduced to two, the duration of each display was increased to 2 sec, and there was no poststimulus mask. Under these conditions, factors related to visual processing time and distribution of attention should not set limits on performance (see, e.g., Beck & Ambler, 1972.…”

Section: Experiments 4: Acuity For Curvaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Visual discrimination, categorical identification, and categorical rating in brief displays of curved lines: Implications for discrete encoding processes.

Foster¹

1983

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Visual discrimination, categorical identification, and categorical rating measurements were made on sets of curved-line stimuli drawn from a theoretically uniform continuum with curvature parameter s. In Experiment 1, discriminability of pairs of curved lines separated by a constant distance on the .s scale was measured at successive points along the scale. Curved lines were presented four at a time in a 100-msec display, which was followed by a random-dot mask. Discrimination performance was found to vary nonsmoothly with s. In Experiment 2, a categorical identification task was performed in which subjects labeled the curved-line stimuli of Experiment 1 straight, just curved, and more than just curved. From these data, a theoretical discrimination performance was computed that was closely congruent to the discrimination performance of Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, three different categorical rating scajes with two, three, and four intervals were tested and each was shown to be less effective than the categorical identification scale for predicting discrimination performance. Mean ratings were, however, highly linear with s, suggesting that the curved-line continuum was psychometrically uniform. Experiment 4 provided further evidence for the uniformity of the curved-line continuum by measuring conventional acuity for curvature. Two rather than four curved lines were presented in each display; duration was increased to 2 sec; and the poststimulus mask was omitted. Acuity was found to vary linearly with s. It was concluded that under conditions in which attention is distributed over a number of elements in the field and in which viewing and effective visual processing time are restricted, performance in discriminating curved-line stimuli may be determined by relatively coarse, discrete visual processes.

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“…Of all the visual cues in a monochromatic static scene that might aid search for a target, one of the most e¡ective is line or edge orientation (Beck & Ambler 1972;Treisman et al 1977;Sagi & Julesz 1985). A line element di¡ering su¤ciently in orientation from a background of other line elements (see ¢gure 1) can be detected in a display exposed for a few tens of milliseconds before being masked: the target element is said to`pop out' (Treisman 1985;Nothdurft 1991;Wolfe 1992).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple groups of orientation–selective visual mechanisms underlying rapid orientated–line detection

Foster

Westland

1998

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

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Visual search for an edge or line element di¡ering in orientation from a background of other edge or line elements can be performed rapidly and e¡ortlessly. In this study, based on psychophysical measurements with ten human observers, threshold values of the angle between a target and background line elements were obtained as functions of background-element orientation, in brief masked displays. A repeated-loess analysis of the threshold functions suggested the existence of several groups of orientation-selective mechanisms contributing to rapid orientated-line detection; speci¢cally, coarse, intermediate and ¢ne mechanisms with preferred orientations spaced at angles of approximately 90 , 35 ^50 and 10 ^25 , respectively. The preferred orientations of coarse and some intermediate mechanisms coincided with the vertical or horizontal of the frontoparallel plane, but the preferred orientations of ¢ne mechanisms varied randomly from observer to observer, possibly re£ecting individual variations in neuronal sampling characteristics.

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Discriminability of differences in line slope and in line arrangement as a function of mask delay

Cited by 75 publications

References 9 publications

Enhancement of perceptual sensitivity as the result of selectively attending to spatial locations

Enhancement of perceptual sensitivity as the result of selectively attending to spatial locations

Visual discrimination, categorical identification, and categorical rating in brief displays of curved lines: Implications for discrete encoding processes.

Multiple groups of orientation–selective visual mechanisms underlying rapid orientated–line detection

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