Visual Perception

11 Pages 2773 Words

e and red letter L's and blue letter T's and the familiar face being resembled as a red letter T. The first panel comprised of all blue letter T's, except for the visual target, the red letter T and the second panel consisted of a mixture of blue letter T's and L's, red letter L's and again the visual target, the red letter T. In the first panel, the visual target being searched for was easy to locate because there was only one visual feature - that being that it had a different colour from the distracters - that needed to be located, Grabowecky, Robertson and Treisman (1993) consequently naming this first panel searching exercise a 'feature search'. In the second panel searching exercise, it was difficult to identify the visual target becau!
se of a need to search for a combination of both colour and form (the letters) features, in order to find the visual target. Grabowecky, Robertson and Treisman (1993) stated that the subject might have had to actively search different areas of the panel in order to find the visual target. Grabowecky, Robertson and Treisman (1993) consequently named this second panel searching exercise a 'conjunction search'.

From this research, Grabowecky, Robertson and Treisman (1993) formed the 'Feature integration theory', which proposes that information is stored in separate 'feature maps', these feature maps including such divisions as colour, orientation, size and stereo distance. These separate divisions are united depending on what divisions are needed and activated when a particular object is being viewed and as a result the mental representation of the object is made.

After research by Luck, Girelli and colleagues (Cited in Posner, 1997), the 'Ambiguity Resolution Theory of Attention' was formed. In this theory, it was stated that ambiguity in neural processing could be resolved by limiting processing to a single object at any time. An example that can be used to explain this theory is simular to t...