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Snowden Paper Critique: Visual Attention To Color

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Snowden Paper Critique:
Visual Attention to Color: Parvocellular Guidance of Attentional Resources?

1. The independent variable of the experiment is luminance and it has 3 levels: light, equiluminant, and dark. The dependent variable is the reaction time (milliseconds).

2. One methodological limitations of this study is that the magnocellular cells responded to a chromatic change so the results could have been skewed and therefore made them inconclusive even though the experimenters tried to control for it. Another limitation is the fact that the experimenters cannot be sure if the way they chose to test their hypothesis could conclude that the parvocellular stream is responsible for pure chromatic cuing or if it was another variable affecting it. Also, I believe that by not including the reaction time for the misses and anticipatory trials they might neglected information that could have been useful in explaining other reasons for the outcomes in the experiment, since greater than 1,500 ms (1.5 seconds) does not seem too long.

3. The experimenters controlled for the possible confounding …show more content…

The authors found out that color vision can play a vital role in guidance of visual behavior when one creates conditions under which a purely chromatic signal can automatically attract attention. Therefore the parvocellular stream is related to motion processing and is capable of automatic attentional capture. However, the findings also demonstrate that motion perception involves both the magnocellular stream and parvocellular stream. The study seems to demonstrate that the parvocellular stream is responsible for the pure chromatic cuing, yet more research still needs to be done since there is an imprecise relationship between the psychophysically defined chromatic signal and the response of physiological streams. These findings also imply and give support for color vision as an important part of human survival, such as the fruit theory does with detecting an

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