Recognition and attention

Sternberg has suggested that a possible way of achieving identification of degraded stimuli would be to execute “preprocessing” operations prior to recognition. Such operations would have some parallels with the “filtering” operations, suggested by Broadbent and others, for perceptual selection and attention. But when trying, in this paper, to consider how such operations could be implemented, some rather non-trivial problems emerge. Experimentally, these doubts find support in visual selection tasks of quite general character, in that filtering does not appear to take place. It seems, however, that these problems may be successfully overcome by some simple, though implicative, conceptual changes. The main implication is that effective focal attention is rather likely to be achieved through a process that is best described as “context-sensitive” selection.