Visual Search for Global and Local Stimulus Features

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Abstract
The observer looked for a target pattern differing from distractors in orientation at one spatial scale only (either at a global or at a local scale) and ignored the other. The stimulus patterns in the search array were vertical or horizontal bars consisting of four oblique line segments sharing the same orientation (45° or 135°). In the search at the global scale, the target and distractors differed from each other in the bar orientation, but not in the orientation of the line segments, which was random. In the search at the local scale, the observer had to use the line orientation for discriminating the target and distractors (the bar orientation was random). The results showed that even though the search was parallel at both scales (ie the search time did not increase with an increasing number of distractors), target detection at the local scale required considerably more time than at the global scale. This latter finding is in agreement with the phenomenon of ‘global precedence’.