McCarley Jason S, Mounts Jeffrey R W, Kramer Arthur F
Institute of Aviation, Human Factors Division, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Savoy, IL 61874, United States.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2007 Oct;126(2):98-119. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2006.11.004. Epub 2006 Dec 28.
Modern theories conceptualize visual selective attention as a competition between objects for the control of cortical receptive fields (RFs). Implicit in this framework is the suggestion that spatially proximal objects, which draw from overlapping pools of RFs, should be more difficult to represent in parallel and with excess capacity than spatially separated objects. The present experiments tested this prediction using analysis of response time distributions in a redundant-targets letter identification task. Data revealed that excess-capacity parallel processing is possible when redundant targets are widely separated within the visual field, but that capacity is near fixed when targets are adjacent. Even at the largest separations tested, however, processing capacity remained strongly limited.
现代理论将视觉选择性注意概念化为对象之间对皮质感受野（RFs）控制的竞争。在这个框架中隐含的观点是，从重叠的RFs池中获取信息的空间上接近的对象，比起空间上分离的对象，更难以并行且以超额容量进行表征。本实验通过对冗余目标字母识别任务中的反应时间分布进行分析来检验这一预测。数据显示，当冗余目标在视野中广泛分离时，超额容量的并行处理是可能的，但当目标相邻时，容量几乎是固定的。然而，即使在测试的最大分离距离下，处理能力仍然受到强烈限制。
