Parallel Processing

Introduction

Visual search, the task of finding a target among distractors, is a common task in our daily lives. Whether we are searching for the remote control among a clutter of objects on table, a face in the crowd at the local bus stop, or a meal listing on the menu at the fast-food restaurant, we rely on the mechanism of visual search and attention each and every day. The ease of search depends primarily on how distinguishable the target of search is from the background. Often times, we depend on attention to facilitate this search for our given target. Attention can help one find an object by, say, focusing on the location of the target. There are two modes of attention in which people typically rely on: parallel processing and serial processing. Parallel processing involves investigating and analyzing a multitude of objects on many different kinds of analysis all at the same time. In contrast, serial processing involves investigating each object one at a time.

What strikes our interest and the question at hand is whether attention moves in a parallel or serial manner when it comes to searching for a target in respect to the number of distractors displayed as well as the type of search (feature and conjunction) concerned. Feature search is usually much
As with the feature search, with the exception of my data which sloped up, which is a non-typical circumstance. This correlates with the idea of parallel and serial processing. As mentioned earlier in the introduction, visual search experiments usually measure search time rather than accuracy percentages. In the typical experiment then, search is considered serial when search times increase with the number of elements in the display, and parallel when search times are independent of the number of items in the