Figure 5.

Serial and parallel search emerge from the same mechanism. (A,B) Parallel and serial search stimuli, respectively. (C,D) Difference in the activation at the target location relative to the distractor locations as time evolves. The time required for this signal to cross threshold is assumed to be related to the time required by humans to find the target. The time required to find the E in X's is constant while the time required to find the E in F's increases linearly with the number of F's. (E) The visual search experiment is repeated for other stimuli with a large number of distractors. Finding the L in X's requires constant time (parallel), while finding the L in T's increases linearly with the number of T's (serial). DM, dorsal stream module. Figure modified from Deco and Lee (2004).