ABSTRACT
The period from his first paper in 1969 with Blaha up to Briggs’ review paper in 1972 was concerned primarily with the differentiation of additional processing stages in the original Smith–Sternberg four-stage model from which he started. The purpose of the experiment was to evaluate whether display information might be processed in parallel or in series. Display load was manipulated by presenting the probe stimulus along with zero, one, or three other items. Briggs and Swanson for the only time in the entire series of studies reviewed here used a one-to-one conservation task as opposed to the greater than one-to-one information reduction task (binary classification) used in all other experiments in the program. The binary classification process is initiated by the presentation of an external stimulus, either positive (match) or negative (no-match), which is processed to form a central representation.
