It is possible to have a non-visual task that is cognitive, but I was wondering whether it was possible to have a task that was visual but not cognitive? Is this even possible?
It's likely that all tasks are, to some extent, cognitive. In that case, what are the some of the least cognitively demanding visual tasks?
Simple detection (or speeded) response to a visual luminance onset is probably as simple as you can get. I'd say it is hard to argue that any part of vision does not involve information processing and thus by definition, some sort of cognition.
It depends on your definition of cognitive: higher order function while perception is simply signal detection vs. cognition in the broad sense of understanding what it is to be seen and in this case you can talk of cognitive vision.. At any rate, there is a lot of examples in the classic works of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka. For instance you might consider the way in which Kanizsa shows that the amodal completion or the so-called "subjective contours" are not dependent on higher order functions but are instead properly perceptual provided that vision has a visual grammar. In such a case the visual outcome that is forced upon the subjects is made to be alternative to what the latter recall or are inclined to infer on the grounds of past experience and implicit or explicit knowledge You may refer to Kanizsa's Organization in Vision, 1979, Praeger: New York.
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Carmelo
The coherence discrimination (perceptually-driven task) described in this publication (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25150283) might be considered a "non-cognitive" task.
Consider a task that stimulates the peripheral (i.e., ambient) visual area (see differences between ambient and focal visual fields, Wickens, 2002), which is thought to be "pre-attentive" requiring no cognitive resources (Uhlarik and Comerford, 2002).
As Mars and Calì wrote, it all depends on how you define "cognitive". If you are speaking about tasks, which involve some form of decision, then you are probably right: all tasks are cogntively driven, no matter how simple the task may be. For instance, if the task is "press a key when you see a light" and you are working on threshold levels, then you will have false hits, along with hits. In other words, some guessing will be envolved. A guess is a decision. Decisions are cognitive.
What about the SURT (surrogate reference task)? It's shown here on slide 11: http://drivingassessment.uiowa.edu/sites/default/files/DA2013/Supplemental/012_DA2013_slides.pdf.
I haven't immediately seen where to find it, but I have used it severeal times (as test person, not as experimenter). I'd say that it can be done with very little cognitive effort - 0 cognitive effort would mean to me being dead.
Would a psychophysical Alternative Forced-Choice task, such as those used to measure discrimination thresholds, work for you? For example, we have used such tasks to investigate effects of colour naming (= cognitive) on low-level (= non-cognitive, sensory) colour processing (http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2121380).
Light is a requirement for vision. You can't see shape or color without light. Perhaps photon reception, the ability to detect light, could be considered 'pre-cognitive' because vision (and therefore any visual tasks) require light. However I'm not sure you would consider photon reception 'non-cognitive'.
hello dear researcher
after your question from weeks ago, I think for it and have a discussion about it.
so i found your answer in one sentences that : when you seeing a object or person or ... for a first time, you dont see it before, you visually see it but not cognitively involved with it for that moment.
your first exposure to it = not cognitively involvment (in my best of knowledge)
consider some of the visual illusion some appear independent of cognition & some are open to cog. influence but don't require it. Also consider things like depth perception whicch appears to not need cognition. Certainly some of the psychphysics stuff doesnt need cognition (as mentioned above)
Some days ago I read a paper from Nadine Sarter cited by Chris Wickens where they used the game Tetris as a secondary task. I assume that this also means a visual task which is not (very) cognitive. A slow version might be rather not too cognitive, a faster one maybe would be to difficult.
Another idea: to use a very simple stimulus-response task. When a light flashes, you have to press a button...?
Depends on what you view as "cognitive", of course, but if it means processes that are 1. "controlled" (require executive attention, not highly automatic), 2. subject to visual short term memory/working memory capacity limitations and 3. relatively slow, then I would suggest that "pre-attentive" visual feature pop-out in a Treisman-type visual search task is a prime example of "non-cognitive" visual processing.
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