The perception of identity in simultaneously presented complex visual displays

Two experiments were conducted in order to examine the information processing in a visual matching task, using digit sequences of varying complexity as the stimuli. Traditionally, reaction times for “same” judgments do not fit into a single-process self-terminating feature testing model, while those for “different” judgments do. Bamber (1969) proposed a two-stage model to account for the data, and the results of these experiments support this type of model. Strong evidence implying that Bamber’s “identity reporter” has a limited capacity in terms of stimulus complexity was also found. This complexity seems to be deemed by stimulus discriminability and the number of “chunks” of information rather than by “bits” of information being transmitted (Miller, 1956).