Moving towards solutions to some enduring controversies in visual search.
How do we find a target item in a visual world filled with distractors? A quarter of a century ago, in her influential 'Feature Integration Theory (FIT)', Treisman proposed a two-stage solution to the problem of visual search: a preattentive stage that could process a limited number of basic features in parallel and an attentive stage that could perform more complex acts of recognition, one object at a time. The theory posed a series of problems. What is the nature of that preattentive stage? How do serial and parallel processes interact? How does a search unfold over time? Recent work has shed new light on these issues.
Wolfe
Jeremy M.
JM
Center for Ophthalmic Research, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 221 Longwood Ave, 02115, Boston, MA, USA