Selective Attention: Noise Suppression and Signal Enhancement

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Schultz, Derek William

• Psychology, Experimental

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8026589

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/66576