Department of Psychology, University of Washington.
Psychol Sci. 2018 Jul;29(7):1062-1071. doi: 10.1177/0956797617751898. Epub 2018 May 7.
To test the limits of parallel processing in vision, we investigated whether people can recognize two words at once. Participants viewed brief, masked pairs of words and were instructed in advance to judge both of the words (dual-task condition) or just one of the words (single-task condition). For judgments of semantic category, the dual-task deficit was so large that it supported all-or-none serial processing: Participants could recognize only one word and had to guess about the other. Moreover, participants were more likely to be correct about one word if they were incorrect about the other, which also supports a serial-processing model. In contrast, judgments of text color with identical stimuli were consistent with unlimited-capacity parallel processing. Thus, under these conditions, serial processing is necessary to judge the meaning of words but not their physical features. Understanding the implications of this result for natural reading will require further investigation.
为了测试视觉中并行处理的极限，我们研究了人们是否能够同时识别两个单词。参与者观看了简短的、掩蔽的单词对，并事先被指示同时判断两个单词（双任务条件）或只判断一个单词（单任务条件）。对于语义类别的判断，双任务缺陷非常大，支持全或无的串行处理：参与者只能识别一个单词，必须猜测另一个单词。此外，如果参与者对一个单词的判断是错误的，那么他们对另一个单词的判断更有可能是正确的，这也支持串行处理模型。相比之下，对于具有相同刺激的文本颜色的判断与无限制容量的并行处理一致。因此，在这些条件下，串行处理对于判断单词的含义是必要的，但不是其物理特征。进一步研究这一结果对自然阅读的影响将需要进一步的调查。
