Huang Liqiang
Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Sci Rep. 2015 Sep 8;5:13769. doi: 10.1038/srep13769.
Visual features are often assumed to be the general building blocks for various visual tasks. However, it is well known that some stimulus categories (i.e., basic features) can be processed in parallel, but others (e.g., Ts in different orientations) need to be scanned serially, and this difference in featural strength seems to be on a fundamentally different dimension from differences in visual strength (e.g., reduction in contrast). This study compared two high-level tasks, namely tasks that require a lot of attentional operations (change detection and pattern comparison), with one low-level task, namely a task that requires few attentional operations (perceptual discrimination). The results confirmed that featural strength has substantial effects on high-level tasks but only a negligible effect on the low-level task. The results also revealed a complementary interaction: Visual strength has a substantial effect on the low-level task, but a negligible effect on high-level tasks. Overall, featural strength and visual strength are two dissociable dimensions in processing of visual features. The present results, along with other findings, challenge the generality of processing visual features.
视觉特征通常被认为是各种视觉任务的通用构建块。然而，众所周知，一些刺激类别（即基本特征）可以并行处理，但其他类别（例如不同方向的T）需要串行扫描，而且这种特征强度的差异似乎与视觉强度的差异（例如对比度降低）处于根本不同的维度。本研究将两个高级任务，即需要大量注意力操作的任务（变化检测和模式比较）与一个低级任务，即需要很少注意力操作的任务（感知辨别）进行了比较。结果证实，特征强度对高级任务有显著影响，但对低级任务的影响可以忽略不计。结果还揭示了一种互补的相互作用：视觉强度对低级任务有显著影响，但对高级任务的影响可以忽略不计。总体而言，在视觉特征处理中，特征强度和视觉强度是两个可分离的维度。目前的结果以及其他发现对处理视觉特征的普遍性提出了挑战。
