Global precedence in attention and decision.

Miller, Jeff·1981·Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Abstract

This article examines the order in which people recognize and respond to different levels of structure within a visual display. Certain previous experiments have been interpreted as showing that information about global characteristics of an array is extracted by the visual system before information about local characteristics. Results from a task in which the observer must attend to both global and local information demonstrate that local information has a large influence on reaction time even when information at the global level is sufficient to determine the response. This finding implies that local information becomes available to decision processes with a time course similar to that of global information. Effects previously attributed to the order in which different levels of structure are recognized may result from differential ease of directing attention to these different levels and selecting responses based on them.

Cites (2)

  1. Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception
    Navon, David · 1977 · Cognitive Psychology
  2. On data-limited and resource-limited processes
    Norman, Donald A, Bobrow, Daniel G · 1975 · Cognitive Psychology

Show all 2 references

Cited by (3)

  1. Task combination and selective intake of information
    Broadbent, Donald E. · 1982 · Acta Psychologica
  2. The forest revisited: More on global precedence
    Navon, David · 1981 · Psychological Research
  3. Consequences of Magnocellular Dysfunction on Processing Attended Information in Schizophrenia
    Martinez, A., Hillyard, S. A., Bickel, S., Dias, E. C., Butler, P. D., Javitt, D. C. · 2012 · Cerebral Cortex

See all 197

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Global precedence in attention and decision. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0096-1523.7.6.1161
The paper
Miller, J. (1981). Global precedence in attention and decision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-1523.7.6.1161

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.