Abstract
Theories of selective attention differ with respect to the amount of processing alleged to be undergone by non-attended material. “Early” selection theorists have argued that only physical properties of the non-attended material are extracted whereas “late” selection theorists have claimed that all inputs are fully analysed with selection taking place at the output stage.
Recent attempts to investigate these theories have investigated memory for non-attended material. The present experiment was designed to investigate memory for physical and semantic properties of non-attended material. Subjects shadowed words presented aurally and were tested for recall of simultaneously presented visual material. The visual stimuli consisted of either patches of colour or the names of those colours, the former containing only physical properties and the latter requiring semantic processing. Different shadowing conditions were employed in which subjects shadowed either colour names or unrelated words.
Recall of the colours was found to be superior to recall of the colour names and recall of both classes of material was found to be superior when subjects shadowed colour names than when they shadowed unrelated words. The results were interpreted as providing evidence for the existence of a post-iconic visual memory store based primarily on physical properties of the input.
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