Sensory and cognitive components of visual information acquisition.

We describe a theory of visual information acquisition and visual memory.The theory has two major components.First, the visual system's initial sensory response to a short-duration, low-contrast stimulus is generated by a linear, low-pass temporal filter that operates on the stimulus's temporal waveform.Second, information is acquired from a stimulus via a randomsampling process whose sampling rate at time t following stimulus onset is jointly proportional to (1) the magnitude by which the sensory response exceeds some threshold and (2) the proportion of still-unacquired information.The theory was successfully tested in five variants of a digit-recall task in which temporal waveform of the stimulus was systematically manipulated.In a final experiment, the theory simultaneously accounted for performance in detection and identification tasks.Implications for visual information-processing, low-contrast detection and binocular combination of information are discussed.