Parallel vs. Serial Information Processing

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Parallel vs. Serial Information Processing

• Remember - attention is about information
  processing

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Parallel vs. Serial Information Processing

• Remember - attention is about information
  processing
• A fundamental question was how much information
  can be processed at once?

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Parallel vs. Serial Information Processing

• Remember - attention is about information
  processing
• A fundamental question was how much information
  can be processed at once?
• The answer seemed to be not much - but can we
  get a better understanding ?

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Parallel vs. Serial Information Processing

• Remember - attention is about information
  processing
• A fundamental question was how much information
  can be processed at once?
• The answer seemed to be not much - but can we
  get a better understanding ?
• At issue is whether or not the brain can
  processes several items at once or must
  selectively attend to each item in turn

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Parallel vs. Serial Information Processing

• How could you determine that ?

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Parallel vs. Serial Information Processing

• How could you determine that ?
• Visual Search paradigms

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Visual Search

• Is there a green square?

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Visual Search

• Parallel search like many independent spotlights

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Visual Search

• Serial search each item is selected until target
  is found

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Visual Search

• Serial search each item is selected until target
  is found

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Visual Search

• Serial search each item is selected until target
  is found

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Visual Search

• Serial search each item is selected until target
  is found

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Visual Search

• How could you test which kind of search was
  happening?

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Visual Search

• Search Slope How long per item?

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Visual Search

• Search Slope How long per item?

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Visual Search

• Search Slope How long per item?

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Visual Search

• Serial Search - linear increase in search time
  with number of distractors

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Visual Search

• Parallel search - search time is independent of
  distracter number

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Visual Search

• Search slope for color singletons is flat. What
  does this tell us about color and attention?

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Next Time Treisman Article!