Serial and Parallel Processing in Visual Perception

我们的视觉体验是一个丰富的，详细的世界，但几十年的视觉感知实验表明，我们在任何时候都只能注意到它的一小部分。传统上，感知理论假设了一个单一的处理流，包括一个大规模并行处理阶段，在选择性瓶颈之后，由一个阶段限制在一个或几个对象的处理时间。虽然这些理论已经成功地解释了各种实验现象，但最近的一系列研究对这种单一处理流的存在提出了质疑。然而，这些新发现存在争议。本项目的目标是严格测试这些新的观测结果，如果它们被证明是可靠的，则将其扩展。这些结果将对我们理解视觉处理产生深远的影响，可能会调和实验结果和视觉体验之间的冲突。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our visual experience is of a rich, detailed world, yet decades of experiments in visual perception demonstrate that we can attend to only a small portion of it at any one time. Traditionally, theories of perception have posited a single processing stream that includes a massively parallel processing stage followed, after a selective bottleneck, by a stage limited to the processing of one or, perhaps, a few objects at a time. While such theories have successfully explained a variety of experimental phenomena, a series of recent studies have called into question the existence of this single processing stream. However, these new findings are controversial. The goal of the present project is to rigorously test these new observations and to extend them if they prove reliable. The results will have far-reaching implications for our understanding of visual processing, potentially reconciling the conflict between experimental results and visual experience.