Divided attention: Storing and classifying briefly presented objects

Pashler, Harold · 1994 · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

DOI: 10.3758/bf03200766

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Summary

This paper investigates the nature of visual divided attention, specifically addressing whether logically independent visual tasks share a common input-selection mechanism. While previous research often examined divided attention by having subjects perform the same task on multiple objects, this study explores the interference that occurs when subjects must perform two distinct tasks—classifying color and storing shape—on the same brief display. The authors aim to determine if visual attention is allocated to specific objects or locations, thereby linking the intake of information for different purposes. The study consists of two experiments where subjects viewed 200-millisecond arrays of six letters. In both experiments, Task 1 required an immediate response to the color of specific letters, while Task 2 required retaining the form of letters for a later same/different recognition test. Experiment 1 varied the color condition: single-task (no color response), one-item-colored (respond to one colored letter), and all-items-colored (respond to all colored letters). Experiment 2 introduced a critical manipulation where subjects had to classify the color of three letters while storing the shape of three different letters. This experiment included both masked and unmasked conditions to test the obligatoriness of the attentional linkage. The results revealed that performing color classification and shape storage on the *same* objects caused only modest interference. However, substantial interference occurred when subjects had to classify the color of some objects while storing the shape of *different* objects. In Experiment 1, subjects detected changes in colored letters significantly better (56.3%) than changes in uncolored letters (29.4%), indicating that attention directed to an object for one task facilitated its storage for another. Experiment 2 confirmed this effect: in the masked condition, error rates for the same/different task were significantly higher when the switched letter was gray (not attended for color) compared to when it was colored (attended for color). This interference persisted even when subjects had an incentive to store only the gray items, suggesting the linkage is not merely strategic. The findings support the conclusion that visual attention is allocated to objects or locations, and this allocation serves as a bottleneck for all subsequent processing. The data suggest that attending to an object for any purpose entails storing a representation of it in visual short-term memory. Consequently, wholly unrelated visual tasks depend on the same input-attention system, and it is difficult to use information from one object for one task while ignoring it for another, even when such separation would be beneficial. This implies that storage in visual short-term memory may be a contingent automatic consequence of attentional allocation.

Key finding

Substantial interference occurs when participants must classify features of some objects while storing features of different objects from the same display, indicating that visual attention is object-based and linked to short-term memory storage.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 28

Provenance

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Topics

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• attention selective divided