Citation

Wright RD, Katz AN, Hughes EA. Acta Psychol. 1993; 83(3): 225-235.

Affiliation

Dept. of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1993, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

8213214

Abstract

Subjects selectively attended to one of two interleaved, novel figures while ignoring the other figure. In subsequent tests administered to determine the extent to which the ignored figure was perceived, recognition of shape and the location of contour gaps was at the chance level. Moreover, recognition of the presence of contour gaps was significantly below the chance level. These results indicate that preattentive visual processing of unattended objects is too crude to encode global shape and local features such as contour gaps. It is suggested that preattentive processing creates visual representations of unattended objects that contain very limited information about features.

Language: en