Abstract
Collinear search impairment (CSI) is a phenomenon where a task-irrelevant collinear structure impairs a target search in a visual display. It has been suggested that CSI is monocular, occurs without the participants’ access to consciousness and is possibly processed at an early visual site (e.g. V1). This effect has frequently been compared with a well-documented opposite effect called attentional capture (AC), in which salient and task-irrelevant basic features (e.g. color, orientation) enhance target detection. However, whether this phenomenon can be attributed to non-attentional factors such as collinear facilitation (CF) has not yet been formally tested. Here we used one well-established property of CF, i.e. that target contrast modulates its effect direction (facilitation vs suppression), to examine whether CSI shared similar signature profiles along different contrast levels. In other words, we tested whether CSI previously observed at the supra-threshold level was reduced or reversed at near-threshold contrast levels. Our results showed that, regardless of the luminance contrast levels, participants spent a longer time searching for targets displayed on the salient singleton collinear structure than those displayed off the structure. Contrast invariance suggests that it is unlikely that CSI is exclusively sub-served by an early vision mechanism (e.g. CF).
Highlights
Collinear search impairment (CSI) is a phenomenon where a task-irrelevant collinear structure impairs a target search in a visual display
We investigated the mechanism underlying collinear visual search impairment by testing the hypothesis that a contrast dependent low-level visual limitation contributed to this impairment
The results showed that participants still required longer time to search for visual targets on the collinear structure than off the collinear structure near the threshold performance level
Summary
Collinear search impairment (CSI) is a phenomenon where a task-irrelevant collinear structure impairs a target search in a visual display. It has been suggested that CSI is monocular, occurs without the participants’ access to consciousness and is possibly processed at an early visual site (e.g. V1) This effect has frequently been compared with a well-documented opposite effect called attentional capture (AC), in which salient and task-irrelevant basic features (e.g. color, orientation) enhance target detection. This search deterioration seems to be limited to collinear grouped structures and was absent when the grouped structure was organized in a ladder shape (Fig. 1C), as slant stripes (Fig. 1D), or when the collinear structure was short (Fig. 1E). A series of experiments were conducted to demonstrate that factors such as strategic suppression over an area with a low occurrence rate by the learning of statistical r egularity[14,15,16], or interference by the matched features between
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