Treisman Feature Integration Essay

The human brain is capable of perceiving and interpreting information or stimuli received through the sense organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) (Weiten, 1998). This ability to perceive and interpret stimulus allows the human being to make meaningful sense of the world and environment around them. However, even as the human being is able to perceive and interpret stimuli information through all sense organs, stimuli is most often or primarily interpreted using the visual (eyes) and auditory (ears) sense organs (Anderson, 2009). However, for the purpose of this paper, the visual information process will be examined.

In another study, five experiments were conducted to determine if coloring a single Stroop element reduced automaticity or slowed the processing of a color. The results demonstrated that indeed it slowed processing of congruent and neutral stimuli more than it slows processing of incongruent stimuli (Monahan, 2001).

The Stroop (1935) effect is the inability to ignore a color word when the task is to report the ink color of that word (i.e., to say "green" to the word RED in green ink). The present study investigated whether object-based processing contributes to the Stroop effect. According to this view, observers are unable to ignore irrelevant features of an attended object (Kahneman & Henik, 1981). In three experiments, participants had to name the color of one of two superimposed rectangles and to ignore words that appeared in the relevant object, in the irrelevant object, or in the background. The words were congruent,

(1) The first question is dealing with the causal or functional role of phenomenal qualities: Under the assumption that seeing is based on cortical information-processing, the question arises, whether the phenomenal qualities of visual perceptions have a function with regard to this processing, in the sense that the intentional content of visual perceptions depends not only on their intentional, but also on their phenomenal qualities. Is it true, as among other authors Frank Jackson and Steven Pinker claim, that phenomenal qualities are only epiphenomena, not having any function for information-processing? (1)

This study examined whether participant’s response times to global target were faster than local targets. Participants had to identify global and local shapes and letters as quick as possible and the response times which were recorded to the computer data. The study was a replication of Navon’s (1977), (cited in Ness Smith and Thirkettle, 2014) experiment but differed, as it was a focused attention task whereas this experiment was a divided attention task. This was the same as Yovel (2001), (cited in Ness, Smith and Thirkettle, 2014) mixed attention task study which tested the global to local accounts. The current

Powell (1986) conducted a study in which individuals viewed a photo or slide. Individuals were required to scan images and decide on an image for the entire display (Powell, 1986). Objects were pointed to, and subjects were asked to identify its location (Powell, 1986). The subject was asked to close his or her eyes and were shown another image. The subjects were to decide if the object was in the correct position (Powell, 1986). The subjects would hear one of the objects and was required to focus on the object while keeping the entire image in his or her mind (Powell, 1986). When the next object was identified, the subjects were to move from the first object to the second watching a black dot moving in a straight line (Powell, 1986).

In previous research, it has been claimed that that ordinary perceivers operate under a grand illusion of perception, and illusion that can be unmasked by change blindness and inattentional blindness. Change blindness and inattentional blindness are phenomena relating to the inability to notice particular stimuli within our visual field, a sort of lapse in our visual system. Change blindness is when a person fails to notice a change within their visual scene because the change occurs during a moment when the intake of visual stimuli is disrupted. Similar to change blindness, inattentional blindness is characterized by the failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected object because attention is engaged in another object, task, or event. Cohen

1. The authors decided to do a replication of a study performed by of Ramachandran & Hubbard (2001) and Hubbard (2005). From this study researchers looked at individuals who had synaesthetes and how they interpreted shapes, numbers and colors. Results from their study showed that individuals who had synaesthetes performed better by interpreting certain pictures by using more of the ‘pop-out’ effect rather than using the serial search effect. It also “assumed that color and shapes are processed independently, which does not hold true for people who have synathecia, giving that some amount of grapheme processing must be required for the color to be included”(Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001b, 2003b). Due to these findings researchers decided to “correct”

The study also finds that the interference in the flash-beep illusion is similar to the within-modality interference from a competing same-modality stream. “Results reveal imperfect and obligatory within- and across-modality integration of information,” (Bizley et al.) and the researchers believe that the level of these interactions depends on feature binding as an object. The mechanism that the brain uses to integrate signals from audio and visual modalities seems to be similar to Bayesian inference which is a theory that suggests the brain makes educated guesses based on the limited information

One of the most common experimental models used to study the temporal and spatial characteristics of attention is Rapid Serial Visual

The Stroop effect: how your brain reacts to conflicting information You can’t always believe what you see. You may have learned your colors before you learned how to read, but what happens when there is conflict between both color recognition and word recognition? The Stroop effect uses the conflict between words and colors to show, how your brain reacts to the conflicting information between the two. By psychologist definition the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. The Stroop effect was originally written about by a man named John Ridley Stroop in the 1930’s.

Participants in the study were asked to match an altered stimuli by size to a reference stimuli in the illustration. The aim was to examine whether the number of depth cues would influence the magnitude of the Ponzo illusion. It was hypothesized that as the number and type of depth cues in the illusion pattern increased, the participants’ estimates of the stimulus would also

Synesthesia is a condition in which people can associate numbers and letters with colors, see shapes when they taste foods, or hear sounds when they smell things. It’s a condition where two senses kind of go together. The most common form is associating numbers and letters with colors. That’s the type of synesthesia that Brian Alvarez has. For him, A is blood red while the letter M is a brick red color (Ariel Bleicher, 2012).

Participants were presented with a stimulus with two parts. Part A had two groupings of dots with a test length that represented the exterior distance of 40mm between the dots (With the interior distance being 10mm). As for the part B, there were again two groupings of dots, but with a representation of the interior distance of 40mm between the pair (With the exterior distance being 80mm). After being presented with the stimuli, the participants were instructed to observe it and report what they saw. Results found that from casual observation, the exterior distance of A was slightly larger than B. Coren and Girgis stated, by grouping via proximity not only results in conscious reorganization of the stimuli in the field but also in a slight distortion of the spaces in accord with the reorganization observed. According to the law of proximity, things grouped together tend to be due to being closer together. So since A’s interior was much closer than B’s, it made A’s exterior appear longer in distance even though they were the same

We are replicating J.R. Stroop’s original experiment The Stroop Effect (Stroop, 1935). The aim of the study was to understand how automatic processing interferes with attempts to attend to sensory information. The independent variable of our experiment was the three conditions, the congruent words, the incongruent words, and the colored squares, and the dependent variable was the time that it took participants to state the ink color of the list of words in each condition. We used repeated measures for the experiment in order to avoid influence of extraneous variables. The participants were 16-17 years of age from Garland High School. The participants will be timed on how long it takes them to say the color of the squares and the color of the words. The research was conducted in the Math Studies class. The participants were aged 16-17 and were students at Garland High School. The results showed that participants took the most time with the incongruent words.