A test of visual feature sampling independence with orthogonal straight lines

Well-specified feature detection models of visual character recognition typically assume feature sampling independence; that is, they assume that the detection of one feature is probabilistically independent of the detection of others. Recent results have suggested this assumption may be suspect with letter-like stimuli. The present study utilized very simple stimuli consisting of up to two straight-line segments that were either physically connected or separated by a gap. A strong model that assumed that features are reported if and only if they are sampled together with independence could not be rejected even when the lines were connected. In all of cognitive psychology, it would be difficult to find a more ubiquitous concept than that of "feature." It has been particularly important in perceptual disci-plines due, perhaps, to the hallmark physiological papers by Hubel and Wiesel (1962) on cats and earlier work by Lettvin, Maturana, Pitts, and McCulloch (1961) on frogs, demonstrating neural units associated with specifi