STEP: A Feature Integration Theory of Attention [35315]

This article applies to:
E-Prime 3.0
E-Prime 1.0

 
Detail
Experiment Author: Adapted from STEP and used with permission of Brian MacWhinney
 
Experiment Description

Participants are given a target (e.g., "Blue letter") and a display of several letters in different colors. They are asked whether the target was present. This should show that the more features ("Blue X" versus "Blue Letter") participants have to look for, the slower they will be. Additionally, a blue X should be harder to find in a set of green X's and N's than in a set of just green N's.
 
Experiment Instructions

In this experiment a target is specified for each block of trials. The target can be a letter or a color or both. A slide with a varying number of distractor stimuli appears. The target stimulus may or may not be present on any given slide. Press the "y" key as quickly as possible if the target stimulus is present. Press the "n" key if the target stimulus is not present. There are 72 trials in this experiment.
 
Experiment Citation

Treisman, A.M., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136.
 
Cited Experiment Abstract

A new hypothesis about the role of focused attention is proposed. The feature-integration theory of attention suggests that attention must be directed serially to each stimulus in a display whenever conjunctions of more than one separable feature are needed to characterize or distinguish the possible objects presented. A number of predictions were tested in a variety of paradigms including visual search, texture segregation, identification and localization, and using both separable dimensions (shape and color) and local elements or parts of figures (lines, curves, etc. in letters as the features to be integrated into complex wholes. The results were in general consistent with the hypothesis. They offer a new set of criteria for distinguishing separable from integral features and a new rationale for predicting which tasks will show attention limits and which will not.
 
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See Also:

STEP: Visual Search [35267]

STEP: Stimulus-Driven Attentional Capture and Attentional Control Settings [35346]

STEP: Reassessing the Evidence for Novel Popout [35172]