Abstract
This study investigated subjects’ ability to make discriminations within the target and distractor sets following consistent mapping training in a visual search task. Differences in the patterns of reaction time data obtained with and without the requirements to make discriminations within target and distractor sets suggest that automatic processing entails two processing changes. One change involves treating the target set as a single equivalence class. This increases efficiency of the memory comparison process. A second change involves inhibition or filtering of distractor elements, which increases the efficiency of visual search.
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This research was submitted to the Graduate School of The Ohio State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree. Financial support for this project was provided by The Ohio State University Graduate School through the Graduate Research Award and by the Psychology Department through the Toops Award. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Sandy Loeb in software development and Merry Northrup in data collection.
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Flach, J.M. Within-set discriminations in a consistent mapping search task. Perception & Psychophysics 39, 397–406 (1986). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03207068
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03207068