Abstract
This study examined visual perception and the rates at which global and local features are reacted to with an aim of replicating and validating a previous experiment conducted by Navon (1977) to see if global processing was faster than local processing. There was 222 University of Newcastle students participating in the experiment, partaking in two phases, one centred round global processing, the other around local processing, where there reaction times were recorded using a computer program and imputed into a data worksheet. Results indicated that, as predicted, global processing occurred at a faster rate than local processing. It was concluded that global features were processed at a faster rate than local features, giving evidence that more attention and focus is needed to identify the more intricate features of an object, however future studies should improve the validity of their studies by employing better randomisation in the gathering of participants.
Visual Perception is an efficient and flexible process( Lin, Lin, & Han, 2008) within the eye that assists humans and animals in acquiring information about their settings by detecting light that is reflected from surfaces, allowing individuals to understand what objects are present and the appropriate behaviour to respond in (Yantis, 2001). Understanding perception and the types of processes that are involved is vital in determining whether we perceive a scene feature by feature or whether the process is immediate upon the visualisation of the object (Navon, 1977). The methods involved in the processing of visual input selects the information that is worth receiving and attending to and focuses more attention on recognising the objects and features of that input. Many studies have focused their research on the hierarchical levels of perception as the focus of the manner in which visual processing is carried out, were larger features are
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