Brief Report 1 - Feature Integration Theory PDF

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Using the template provided, complete the Title / Introduction / Method section based on the Feature Integration Theory experiment conducted in your tutorial class.
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FEATURE INTEGRATION THEORY OF ATTENTION Treisman and Gelade (1980) found that humans become aware of unitary objects in two different ways. These include focal attention and top-down processing. This finding has been labelled the Feature-Integration Theory. The current experiment aimed to replicate these findings. It was predicted that when participants where asked to search for a stimulus under a feature design, their reaction would be faster than if they were asked to search for a conjunctive design stimulus. METHOD Participants Twenty-four undergraduate university students. Twenty were female and four were male. These participants undertook the experiment as a part of their Cognitive Psychology tutorial course. Materials and Apparatus During this experiment, participants where required to sit a standard distance away from a computer screen. The screen then displayed instructions for the experiment. Procedure Participants where required to search the screen for a given stimulus; in this case a green T. If the participant was able to see the stimulus they were required to press the letter Z on their keyboard. If the stimulus was not present the participant was required to press the forward slash (/) key on their keyboard. The experiment instructed participants to react to the stimulus as quickly as possible. A number of stimuli were presented, and then the participants were instructed to search for either a blue letter, or the letter S, and participants were to respond accordingly.

Results Mean reaction time (ms) for each condition across each display size can be seen in Figure 1. Reaction times did not vary with display size in the Feature positive condition, but there was a slight increase in reaction time as the display size increased in the Feature negative condition. For the conjunctive conditions, there was a sharp increase in reaction time with increasing display size and this effect was larger in the Conjunction negative condition compared to the Conjunction positive condition.

Figure 1. Mean reaction time (ms) for the feature positive, feature negative, conjunction positive, and conjunction negative conditions across each display size (1, 5, 15, 30). Note that positive indicates that the target was present in the display and negative indicates that the target was absent from the display.

Discussion The results from our experiment supported our hypotheses and replicated the findings by Treisman and Gelade (1980). Display size had a minimal effect on reaction time in the feature conditions suggesting that when we are searching for a single feature we can do so using a parallel process. In contrast, display size was related to reaction time in the conjunction conditions. Reaction time increased with increasing display sizes. This suggests that when we are searching for an object that has a combination of features that we use a serial search whereby we examine each item in our environment one at a time. There were interesting differences between the positive and negative conditions. Specifically, at the larger display sizes, reaction times in the negative conditions were slower compared to the positive conditions. This suggests that when the target is present in the display (i.e., the positive condition) participants use a self-terminating search, that is, they make their response as soon as they identify the target. However, when the target is absent (i.e., the negative condition) participants use an exhaustive search whereby they examine every item in the display before making their response. The results from this study add to our knowledge about attention and visual search. By replicating the findings of Treisman and Gelade (1980) we provide further support for the Feature Integration Theory of attention. A potential limitation of this theory is that it does not account for the possibility of multisensory features (e.g., visual and auditory features) or the integration of features outside of the current focus of spatial attention. References Treisman, A.M. & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12 97-136....