Attentional selection: Early, late, or neither?

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Abstract
One persisting controversy in attention is whether attentional selection occurs prior to stimulus identification or after it. There is also a third alternative, i.e. that all perceptual analyses are started in parallel at various rates, and that selection is done as soon as the selection cue is processed. To test among the alternatives, I used an experimental paradigm in which a semantic dimension (alphanumeric category) and a physical dimension (colour) are compared on both their selective efficiency and their likelihood of being processed when unattended. Both are examined by the effect of the compatibility between the values of the response dimension on the attended and unattended stimuli. Large differences between colour and category in all experiments argue against late selection. The manipulation of display size in the first two experiments provided further evidence in favour of the early selection view. Manipulating the onset of stimulus attributes in Experiment 3 failed, on the whole, to interact with compatibility, contrary to predictions from the third theoretical view.

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