Journal article
A competitive interaction theory of attentional selection and decision making in brief, multielement displays.
PL Smith, DK Sewell
Psychological Review | Published : 2013
DOI: 10.1037/a0033140
Abstract
We generalize the integrated system model of Smith and Ratcliff (2009) to obtain a new theory of attentional selection in brief, multielement visual displays. The theory proposes that attentional selection occurs via competitive interactions among detectors that signal the presence of task-relevant features at particular display locations. The outcome of the competition, together with attention, determines which stimuli are selected into visual short-term memory (VSTM). Decisions about the contents of VSTM are made by a diffusion-process decision stage. The selection process is modeled by coupled systems of shunting equations, which perform gated where-on-what pathway VSTM selection. The the..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
The research reported in this article was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP110103406. A paper describing this work was presented at the Third International Workshop on Visual Attention, in Allahabad, India, in October 2011. We thank Barbara Dosher for stimulating questions and Olivia Carter and Piers Howe for suggestions during the writing. We thank Claus Bundesen, Gordon Logan, and Marius Usher for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Philip L. Smith thanks John Palmer and the Department of Psychology of the University of Washington for hospitality during his 2011 sabbatical, when the foundation work for this article was carried out.