ATTENTION    When we first 
encounter a member of a class 
with which we are relatively 
unfamiliar, l believe that we 
attend to those global 
properties that distinguish it 
from other classes of objects: 
for the infant, a face as against 
all other things; for the adult, 
one twin face as against all 
other faces; and so forth. We 
"describe" only those 
characteristics to which we 
attend. That, in turn, means 
that the memory trace left 
behind contains no more 
specificity than did the global 
percept.

    In our laboratory, my 
colleagues and I have done an 
experiment on form perception 
that demonstrates this 
hypothesized failure to 
perceive all the subtle nuances 
in a complex figure. The 
subjects saw such a figure for a 
brief period. Shortly thereafter 
they took a test consisting of 
two or more figures, one of 
which was the same as the one 
just seen. The others were 
similar globally but differed in 
specifics. Our subjects did no 
better than chance in selecting 
the correct alternative among 
the shapes illustrated. Yet, 
when they were given an easier 
test in which none of the 
wrong alternatives was of the 
same overall shape as the 
original, the subjects had no 
difficulty in selecting the right 
one. Thus, it is dear that the 
global character of the shape 
was perceived and encoded into 
memory, but the details of it 
were not.