Professor
Loftus described a theory of visual information acquisition
and visual memory. The theory has two major components.
First, the visual systems initial sensory response to
a short duration, low- contrast stimulus is generated
by a linear, low-pass temporal filter that operates
on the stimulus's temporal waveform. Second, information
is acquired from the stimulus through an independent
sampling process whose sampling rate at time t following
stimulus onset is jointly proportional to (a) the magnitude
by which the sensory response exceeds some threshold
and (b) the proportion of still unacquired information.
The theory was successfully tested in five variants
of a digit recall task in which temporal waveform of
the stimulus was systematically manipulated. In a final
experiment, the theory simultaneously accounted for
performance in detection and identification tasks. Implications
for visual information processing, low-contrast detection,
and binocular combination of information were discussed.
