Bridge-Building: SFT Interrogation of Major Cognitive Phenomena

In early studies employing the SFT, the stimuli were simple visual signals, mainly dots, lines, or letters of the alphabet. Although this feature facilitated focusing on theory development, it has reduced the impact of SFT on mainstream cognitive science. The goal of this chapter is to reconnect the SFT to cognitive psychology via an SFT-guided examination of four major phenomena of current cognitive science: the Stroop and Garner effects in attention, the Size-Congruity effect in numerical cognition, and the Redundant-Target effect in speeded signal detection. We show that, in each case, the SFT analysis led to novel insights, reformulating old problems and challenging established theories.