PSYC58H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Ulric Neisser, Visual Search, Cognitive Psychology
Document Summary
Target: the item you are looking for. Distractor: any stimulus other than the target. Set size: the total number of items in a visual search display. Considered by many to be the father of cognitive psychology. Studied many cognitive phenomena, including visual perception, memory, and intelligence. His experiments in the 1960s on visual search paved the way for many subsequent explorations of this topic. It seems to be carried out by a multitude of separate mechanisms arranged in a hierarchy, the more complex mechanisms receiving as their input the information that has been assimilated and predigested by more elementary ones . Neisser and his colleagues used visual search as a tool to investigate this information-processing hierarchy. Neisser started with fairly simple visual search tasks. For example, search for the letter k in the following list of letters. This is a picture of how the test is done. The observer (recorder) is further away from you.
