Lesioning a connectionist model of visual search: Selective effects on distractor grouping.

Presents a connectionist model of visual search, Search via Recursive Rejection (SERR) by G. W. Humphreys and H. J. Muller (in press), in which search is determined by patterns of grouping between distractors and between simple form elements. The performance of SERR is examined after it is subject to various types of "lesion." Lesioning is produced either by increasing the internal noise on the activation functions governing the interactions between processing units or by eliminating processing units from different loci in SERR. Simulations demonstrate that (1) search processes can be disrupted by adding internal noise to search functions, (2) there can be selective effects on grouping processes, and (3) these selective effects can be associated with different types of lesion to different stages in SERR. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)