Selective attention, event perception and the criterion of acceptability principle: evidence supporting and rejecting the doctrine of prior entry

Abstract The doctrine of prior entry (Titchener 1908) was tested, manipulated, and qualified in a series of seven experiments. Experiments 1–4 evidenced moderate to extensive prior entry effects, supporting the doctrine's contention that selective attention favors a speeded percept or “prior entry” into consciousness of the attended stimulus over any closely occurring non-attended signal. However, a criterion of acceptability (COA) hypothesis was put forward as an alternative explanation for the perceptual biases associated with the prior entry phenomenon. Experiments 5 and 6 failed to reject the COA hypothesis in order judgments of numerosity and magnitude, respectively. These results prompted the design of experiment 7 which directly tested and supported the hypothesis that the prior entry effect is a unique phenomenon within a larger perceptual law implicating experiment-specific judgment criteria as mediators in high-speed, dual-stimulus order perception tasks.

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