Assignment Task: Treisman (1986)
The goal of this assignment is to expose you to an example of a large-scale theory in cognitive psychology. In this paper, Anne Treisman describes her feature integration theory of attention, which is one of the most successful theories in modern cognitive psychology. The theory was originally proposed in 1980, and Treisman and her colleagues spent the next decades testing and refining it. It has also provided the starting for many other scientists' research, in part because is links together the cognitive factor of attention with the underlying neural representation of sensory information.
Question 1) Give an example of an illusory conjunction that might occur in the real world. Specifically, describe the stimuli that would be present and what the person would incorrectly perceive. Why don't illusory conjunctions occur very often in the real world (hint: think about the "carrot" experiment)?
Question 2) Give a real-world example of a feature search and a real-world example of a conjunction search. Do feature and conjunction search tasks occur very often in the real world?
Question 3) In a conjunction search task, reaction times increase as the number of items in the display (the "set size") increases. The rate of increase is approximately twice as great for target-absent trials than for target-present trials. Explain why this happens.