Evidence of Serial Processing in Visual Word Recognition.

ABSTRACT: To test the limits of parallel processing in vision, we investigated whether people can recognize two words at once. Participants viewed brief, masked pairs of words and were instructed in advance to judge both of the words (dual-task condition) or just one of the words (single-task condition). For judgments of semantic category, the dual-task deficit was so large that it supported all-or-none serial processing: Participants could recognize only one word and had to guess about the other. Moreover, participants were more likely to be correct about one word if they were incorrect about the other, which also supports a serial-processing model. In contrast, judgments of text color with identical stimuli were consistent with unlimited-capacity parallel processing. Thus, under these conditions,

SUBMITTER: White AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6050133 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature