Presenter:  Cheng-Ta Yang
Presentation type:  Talk
Presentation date/time:  7/26  10:55-11:20
 
The decision process in change detection
 
Cheng-Ta Yang, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Yung-Fong Hsu, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Yei-Yu Yeh, Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
 
Change detection is a fundamental process in human visual perception. Detecting an object change involves a feature-by-feature comparison as each object consists of multiple features. We used a double factorial design developed by Townsend and Nozawa (1995) to investigate the process architecture, stopping rule, and capacity limitation in detecting changes of different features in an object. Observers were required to perform a change detection task. Changes in luminance and orientation were independently manipulated with two levels of ambiguity (ambiguous/ unambiguous). Reaction times in detecting changes of features in the redundant-target condition were faster than those in the single-target condition. Moreover, we computed the mean interaction contrast of reaction times and the interaction contrasts of survival function of reaction time distributions in the redundant-target condition. The results supported either a parallel self-terminating or a coactive process in change detection. Change detection is processed with either unlimited capacity or supercapacity. Adding a change signal in the other attribute can improve the detection performance. This study provides a direct test to show how different features are processed to contribute to the decision process in change detection. Keyword: change detection, double factorial design