Duncan J
MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, England.
Percept Psychophys. 1993 Oct;54(4):425-30. doi: 10.3758/bf03211764.
Accuracy is often reduced when two visual discriminations must be made concurrently ("divided attention"). According to a hypothesis originally proposed by Treisman (1969) and Allport (1971), this result should depend on the similarity of required discriminations. When discriminations concern different visual dimensions, they should be made in somewhat separate visual subsystems, reducing interference between them. This prediction was tested in two experiments, involving discriminations of shape, size, orientation, and spatial frequency. In different conditions of divided attention, concurrent discriminations concerned either the same or different dimensions, and either one or two objects. The results showed that performance depends only on the number of relevant objects, not on the number or similarity of required discriminations. They suggest that selective attention to an object is a coordinated state in which the outputs of multiple visual subsystems are made concurrently available for control of behavior.
当必须同时进行两种视觉辨别（“分散注意力”）时，准确性往往会降低。根据最初由特雷斯曼（1969年）和奥尔波特（1971年）提出的一种假设，这一结果应该取决于所需辨别的相似性。当辨别涉及不同的视觉维度时，它们应该在某种程度上独立的视觉子系统中进行，从而减少它们之间的干扰。这一预测在两项实验中得到了检验，实验涉及形状、大小、方向和空间频率的辨别。在不同的分散注意力条件下，同时进行的辨别涉及相同或不同的维度，以及一个或两个物体。结果表明，表现仅取决于相关物体的数量，而不取决于所需辨别的数量或相似性。它们表明，对一个物体的选择性注意是一种协调状态，在这种状态下，多个视觉子系统的输出同时可供行为控制使用。
