Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Enumeration of canonical patterns (e.g., faces of six-sideddice) has generally been characterized by researchers as aholistic process, in which all items are perceived collectively.In previous work, based on a holistic processing view of enu-meration by pattern recognition, we predicted that enumera-tion of canonical forms would not be significantly affected byattentional load. In this paper, we present the results from twoexperiments designed to test this prediction using a divided-attention paradigm. In contrast to our predictions, enumerationof canonical patterns was disrupted by attentional load. Fur-thermore, enumeration of patterns under high attentional loadshowed evidence of conflation between patterns with similarcontours, providing evidence against a holistic processing ac-count of canonical pattern recognition.