detection and identification

[Dan Mapes-Riordan <dmapes@xxxxxxx>]

Pierre Divenyi wrote:
>>I would venture pointing out that (as they have shown) identification
>>and discrimination >>can be regarded as esentially identical
processes.

Dan Tollin wrote:
>This is correct as detection and discrimination are simply  special
cases of
>identification where the number of stimuli is two.

If I may add a bit to this discussion, I would just like to point out
that Hafter, Bonnel and Gallun recently presented data in which
detection showed no decrement in performance during a divided attention
task whereas identification did show a loss in performance (Hafter,
Bonnel, and Gallun, Proceedings of the 16th ICA and 135th Meeting of
ASA, 1567-1568 (1998)).  Presumably, the identification mechanism used a
limited attentional resource (e.g., memory) whereas detection did not.


Dan Mapes-Riordan
dmapes@luc.edu

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