Seven Faces in a Crowd: Parallel or Serial Information Processing

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Abstract
Volunteers were given the: task of recognizing a target face buried in a “crowd” of unfamiliar figures. Recognition time increased significantly in proportion to crowd group-size, with a significant difference in times for 7- and 8-member groups. Changing the signal complexity of target stimuli did not affect results. A combined analog-digital processing model is proposed in which information is processed parallelly in batches of limited capacity (<3 bits), which are themselves processed serially.