title: Investigating the visual span in comparative search: the effects of task difficulty and divided attention.
abstract: In three experiments, participants' visual span was measured in a comparative visual search task in which they had to detect a local match or mismatch between two displays presented side by side. Experiment 1 manipulated the difficulty of the comparative visual search task by contrasting a mismatch detection task with a substantially more difficult match detection task. In Experiment 2, participants were tested in a single-task condition involving only the visual task and a dual-task condition in which they concurrently performed an auditory task. Finally, in Experiment 3, participants performed two dual-task conditions, which differed in the difficulty of the concurrent auditory task. Both the comparative search task difficulty (Experiment 1) and the divided attention manipulation (Experiments 2 and 3) produced strong effects on visual span size.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G3, Canada. marc@psych.utoronto.ca
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pomplun
authors.forename: E M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Reingold
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Shen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014796:Visual Perception