Independent encoding of colors and shapes from two stimuli

Observers were presented with brief exposures of pairs of colored objects (letters) and asked to report both the color and the shape of each object. Several observers showed strikingly clear evidence of nearly perfect stochastic independence between reports of the four features (two colors and two shapes). For instance, the probability that the shape of a given object could be reported seemed independent of (a) whether the color of the object could be reported and (b) whether features of the other object could be reported. Such stochastic independence is predicted by many parallel-processing models (e.g., Bundesen, 1990). However, the results are difficult to reconcile with simple serial models in which the encoding of one object is completed before the encoding of another object is begun.