One needs to look no further than the rich set of articles in this special issue to know that Feature Integration Theory (FIT) continues to be one of the most influential sets of ideas in cognitive psychology. From research on multi-sensory integration to depression, the seeds of Anne Treisman’s theory have spread far and wide. […]
Features and Objects
My decades-long involvement with Anne Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory (FIT) must have begun in 1986. I was a junior faculty member at MIT at the time, working on visual aftereffects and binocular vision. I didn’t know much about attention. One might say that I had not paid attention to attention. Then, in 1986, Anne published an […]
Clutter is a fact of life. Wherever you look, there is clutter. Even the tidiest of tidy rooms will contain much visual clutter: some objects will be in front of others, thereby partially obscuring them. So if you need to reach for the cup that’s behind the toaster, then your visual system must work through […]
Finding your office key amidst your building key, the lab key, your house key, the other house key in case you need to cat-sit for a friend is like finding a needle in a haystack. People who have tons of keys develop elaborate organizational systems, clumping together keys for similar places―like the Psychology building―which can […]
You reach for the life-saving glass of water handed to you from the judge’s bench, with a bit of assistance from your co-defendant. You take a sip and the rest is movie history. What happens to your attention during that sequence of events? When we plan a movement, for example to reach for a glass […]
How long is a piece of string? We all know this proverbial and largely rhetorical question. We also probably assume that it has no right answer—indeed, that’s the point of this rhetorical question in the first place, namely to indicate that the issue under consideration does not have a meaningful answer. Enter the venerable BBC. […]
The own-race bias in face processing is a well-known effect that refers to the fact that people generally find it easier to identify faces of people of their own race. Although the general effect has been known for decades, the source of the bias is not well understood. There are a number of broad explanations […]
Did you meet your partner online? As recently as 2005, few Americans would have answered this question in the affirmative, but according to Pew Research, in 2016 around 15% of Americans reported using online dating sites or mobile dating apps.
We keep track of multiple objects every day. When we drive, we need to keep track of the cyclist near the curb, the dump truck bearing down on us from behind, and the lost tourist in front of us who is signaling turns at random. When we are on the beach on a family outing, […]
How many things can we attend to simultaneously? Imagine being an air traffic controller and you are monitoring O’Hare arrivals on the day before Thanksgiving. How many aircraft can you attend to simultaneously? Or imagine watching a flock of grazing impalas in Krueger National Park or the Serengeti while a pride of lions is casually […]