The
Effects of the Required Processing of Stimuli on Selective Letter
Identification
I. Watanabe |
Eight
undergraduate students participated in an experiment which was designed
to explain the time lag effects proposed by Watanabe (1986): It takes
a longer time to identify a target letter from a visual display consisting
of multiple letters when the letters requiring a different response
are similar than when they are dissimilar. The reaction time of pressing
buttons to the target letter was measured as a function of the noises
in the display. The reaction time was longer in the condition which
contained noise letters than in the condition which did not. The
time lag effects were not affected by the similarity of the elements
in the display to the letters which result in the opposite response
to the target. The results suggest that the effects are caused by
the long processing required for the target and noise letters until
late in the human visual information processing system.
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