Temporal Pacing in Visual Attention.

Abstract

Viewers engaged in a continuous letter classification task involving selective attending to one of two information streams (relevant and irrelevant). Temporal and spatial relations were systematically varied between the two streams to address hypotheses about external control of attention in dynamic environments. Relative event timing was varied both within and between the two streams. Spatial relationships for relevant and irrelevant events was the same for experiments 1 & 3, but different for experiment 2. Contrary to predictions from either spatial or object oriented approaches, attending and hence, performance, to relevant events in all three experiments was dependent on the integrated rhythmic patterns that obtained between the two streams, rather than spatial location and event features. Several alternative hypotheses addressed the issue of non-spatial control of attending to dynamic displays, The best account assumes viewer attending is 'paced' by rhythms emerging from an integration of relevant and irrelevant event streams. (BA)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1994
Accession Number
ADA289785

Entities

People

  • June J. Skelly
  • Mari R Tye
  • Merry M. Roe

Organizations

  • Armstrong Laboratory

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Air Force
  • Analysis Of Variance
  • Biological Sciences
  • Contrast
  • Data Analysis
  • Environment
  • Governments
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Hypotheses
  • Information Processing
  • New York
  • Perception
  • Psychology
  • Reaction Time
  • Regression Analysis
  • Time Intervals

Fields of Study

  • Biology
  • Psychology

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Computer Vision.