Illusory conjunctions are alive and well: a reply to Donk (1999).
When presented with a red T and a green O, observers occasionally make conjunction responses and indicate that they saw a green T. These errors have been interpreted as reflecting separable processing stages of feature detection and integration with the illusory conjunctions arising from a failure at the integration stage. Recently, M. Donk (1999) asserted that the phenomenon of illusory conjunctions is an artifact. Conjunction reports are actually the result of confusing a nontarget item (O in the example above) for a target item (the letter T) and (correctly) reporting the color associated with the (incorrectly) selected target. The authors demonstrate that although target-nontarget confusion errors are a potential source of conjunction reports, there is a plethora of findings that cannot be accounted for by this confusion model. A review of the literature indicates that in many studies, illusory conjunctions do result from a failure to properly integrate features.
Prinzmetal
W
W
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley 94720, USA. wprinz@socrates.berkeley.edu
Diedrichsen
J
J
Ivry
R B
RB
D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D009903:Optical Illusions; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011601:Psychophysics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics