Selective Attention: Noise Suppression and Signal Enhancement
Schultz, Derek William
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/66576
Description
Title
Selective Attention: Noise Suppression and Signal Enhancement
Author(s)
Schultz, Derek William
Issue Date
1980
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Psychology, Experimental
Language
eng
Abstract
Whether visual selective attention is manifested under display conditions containing no competing or irrelevant noise elements has become a topic of increasingly widespread interest in visual information processing. The results of many early detection studies suggest that attention is the filtering out of noise items in a visual display. More recent research results employing latency paradigms suggest a different conclusion--visual selective attention occurs in fields devoid of irrelevant noise. This study provided multiple convergent measures of processing in an attentional paradigm employing no extraneous noise by joining two information processing paradigms (leading indicator and cost/benefit) in a design maximally receptive to latency-operating characteristic (LOC) analyses. Data obtained provided evidence that visual selective attention can occur in the absence of extraneous noise in the visual field. Though latencies to targets following both positionally valid and invalid cues in the cost/benefit paradigm dropped identically across longer time intervals between the cue and the target, accuracy and confidence rating data suggest that processing differs between the two conditions. Further, the slopes of regressions on LOC's under the valid cue condition systematically increased as the time interval between the cue and the target increased; LOC slopes under the invalid cue condition decreased as cue-to-target time increased. Data obtained under two control conditions are incompatible with a variety of possible artifactual explanations of the effect. These data are regarded as evidence for both noise suppression and signal enhancement effects in visual selective attention, even in visual fields devoid of irrelevant or competing noise elements.
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