Abstract
We investigated the effects of probability on visual search. Previous work has shown that people can utilize spatial and sequential probability information to improve target detection. We hypothesized that performance improvements from probability information would extend to the efficiency of visual search. Our task was a simple visual search in which the target was always present among a field of distractors, and could take one of two colors. The absolute probability of the target being either color was 0.5; however, the conditional probability—the likelihood of a particular color given a particular combination of two cues—varied from 0.1 to 0.9. We found that participants searched more efficiently for high conditional probability targets and less efficiently for low conditional probability targets, but only when they were explicitly informed of the probability relationship between cues and target color.
Highlights
The effects of cues in attentional tasks are well documented (Posner and Cohen, 1984; Wright and Ward, 2008; Carrasco, 2011)
For the most part, cuing and attention are framed in terms of valid/invalid and present/absent, but such binary characterizations may obscure important distinctions (Anderson, 2011), that attentional effects may operate on a continuum
While this study demonstrates attentional effects for probability cues it did not vary the number of display elements, leaving open the question of whether probability cuing affects the efficiency of search
Summary
The effects of cues in attentional tasks are well documented (Posner and Cohen, 1984; Wright and Ward, 2008; Carrasco, 2011). Experiment 1 showed that RTs were faster for trials where the cues predicted target features and that the RT—stimulus number slope increased different across probability conditions.
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