SELECTIVE ATTENTION, EVENT PERCEPTION AND THE CRITERION OF ACCEPTABILITY PRINCIPLE - EVIDENCE SUPPORTING AND REJECTING THE DOCTRINE OF PRIOR ENTRY

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. © 1990.