Biomedical subjects
W P Banks
Publications and source records attributed to W P Banks.
Visual fatigue and spatial frequency adaptation to video displays of text.
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Semantic congruity and expectancy as separate processes.
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Asymmetry of visual interference.
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Semantic and perceptual processes in symbolic comparisons.
This article studies the processing of pictures and words as symbols. Pictures lead to faster and more accurate responses than words when the task is to decide which member of a pair of pictures or words denotes the larger or smaller object. The present experiments show that the superiority of pictures results from the fact that pictures are interpreted more quickly than words, but that after the interpretation is made, processing is the same. These experiments also give evidence that pictures and words are both processed in terms of linguistic codes rather than mental images. The results are well accounted for by an information-processing model that is based on two general assumptions: (a) The stimuli and the instructions are represented as discrete codes, and (b) processing proceeds until one and only one of the stimulus codes is the same as the code for the instructions.
Color information in iconic memory.
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Areal and temporal summation in the thermal reaction time.
It has previously been shown that the reaction time (RT) to radiant heat measures spatial summation of warmth, because the RT decreases with increases in both the areal extent and the intensity (flux density) of the heat. The previous studies of RT let the response terminate the stimulus exposure and thus introduced a confounding between stimulus duration and intensity, since the weaker the stimulus is, the longer it is presented. The present study shows the RT reflects spatial summation even with a fixed, brief stimulus duration. The precise rules for trading area and intensity that are obtained with fixed-duration pulses differ from those obtained with response-terminated ones, but both sets of functions are consistent with each other and with the results of magnitude estimation if it is assumed that the sensory effect of the heat sums over the stimulus duration, that is, that the RT reflects temporal as well as spatial summation. Two further experiments provide direct evidence for temporal summation.