Memorial University DAI: Visual processing of multielement arrays and the selective masking function

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Title	Visual processing of multielement arrays and the selective masking function
Author	Keating, John Kevin
Description	Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1977. Psychology
Date	1977
Pagination	vi, 54 leaves. : ill.
Subject	Visual perception
Degree	M.Sc.
Degree Grantor	Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dept. of Psychology
Discipline	Psychology
Language	Eng
Notes	Bibliography: leaves 48-51.
Abstract	If a visually presented array of alphanumeric material is followed by a patterned masking stimulus the perception of the items at the ends of the display will be unaffected, while those in the centre of the array will be masked substantially. Termed selective masking, this phenomenon has been extensively investigated, largely as a technique to make inferences about the nature of visual information processing. - The results of numerous studies on the selective masking phenomenon indicate that the items at the ends of a row are processed first and thus escape the effect of a temporally following mask. There has been some uncertainty about the order of processing after the end items have been processed. Experiment I investigated this processing order by systematically varying the interval between the offset of the letter arrays and the onset of the masking stimulus. The results indicated that the ends of the row are indeed processed first and that subsequent serial processing is in general from both ends towards the middle. -- It has also been shown that this ends-middle processing order can be altered if the observer is given sufficient information to direct his attention to a single item in the display. When a spatial cue is presented for one of the items at stimulus onset or when the subject is instructed to report an item which differs in category from the background items, the subject attends to a single item and therefore does not process the array with an ends-first approach. The second experiment investigated the extent and nature of the processing strategy which observers use when presented with an array containing six letters and one digit. In addition, the effect of a categorically incongruous item on the processing of background items was studied. The results show that observers do not selectively process the incongruous item when digit report is required on only a small portion of the trials. The data also indicate that the processing of the odd item and the background items occurs at the same time, i.e. in parallel, but that the overriding serial, ends-first processing strategy common to encoding a multielement array is still employed.
Type	Text
Resource Type	Electronic thesis or dissertation
Format	Image/jpeg; Application/pdf
Source	Paper copy kept in the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University Libraries
Local Identifier	76005941
Rights	The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission.
Collection	Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Scanning Status	Completed
PDF File	(13.00 MB) -- http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/theses/Keating_JohnKevin.pdf
CONTENTdm file name	72172.cpd