Attention, Perception and Integration

To briefly summarise Feature Integration Theory, it is a way that two researchers (Treisman & Gelade, 1980) propose how people direct their attention when trying to comprehend the world around them. It is both a perceptual theory and an attentional theory, specifically visual attention.

Feature Integration Theory argues we process visual items in two stages.

1. We focus on one distinguishing attribute of the object we are trying to perceive e.g. the red colour of a round apple. This process is extremely quick, automatic, unconscious and is labelled the pre-attention phase.

2. We then use focused attention to distinguish what we are perceiving. To stick to the apple analogy, we would use focused attention after the first stage if we were tasked to find a round apple in a barrel filled with misshaped apples. This process is much slower and conscious.

   
   

One study supporting this theory was conducted on patients suffering from Balint’s syndrome. Whilst this syndrome is not well understood, it is usually caused by damage to the parietal lobe. Considering the parietal lobe is vital in sensory perception, patients with Balint’s syndrome are ideal participants to test Treisman and Gelade’s theories. It was discovered that when these participants were given a visual stimulus that required combining visual features, i.e. integrating features, they were unable to do so. (Cohen & Rafal, 1991.) This phenomenon is completely in line with Feature Integration Theory, because these participants are attempting to perform the second phase, i.e. focused attention, which is a more cognitively complex task than the first stage. Despite attempting this, they are physiologically incapable of doing so. This finding gives scientific credence to Feature Integration Theory.

Another interesting and unusual study showed that archerfish display similar behaviour to humans when it comes to feature detection and feature integration (Reichenthal et al., 2020.) Both archerfish and people performed a set of extensive and comparative visual search experiments, with a very similar experiment design for both the archerfish and human participants to make the experiment as fair as possible, despite the obvious differences between people and archerfish!

The humble archerfish.

It was found that both archerfish and people performed what the researchers labelled ‘basic feature searches’ and ‘conjunction search tasks’ in a significantly similar way. The researchers argued that this finding gives credence to a biological basis for Feature Integration Theory, because it was shown to occur in a non-human species. By extension, this also gives credence to an evolutionary basis for Feature Integration Theory, because it is believed to be a cross-species phenomenon, thus meaning it must have evolved from a common ancestor in the distant past. By demonstrating that Feature Integration Theory may have a biological and evolutionary backbone, this study gives even more scientific credit to Feature Integration Theory.

References

Cohen, A., & Rafal, R. (1991). Attention and Feature Integration: Illusory Conjunctions in a Patient with a Parietal Lobe Lesion. Psychological Science, 2(2), 106–110. doi: 10.1111/j.1467–9280.1991.tb00109.x

Reichenthal, A., Segev, R., & Ben-Shahar, O. (2020). Feature integration theory in non-humans: Spotlight on the archerfish. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82(2), 752–774. doi: 10.3758/s13414–019–01884–4