Abstract
Visual search is considerably speeded when the target's characteristics remain constant across successive selections. Here, we investigated whether such inter-trial priming increases the target's attentional priority, by examining whether target repetition reduces search efficiency during serial search. As the study of inter-trial priming requires the target and distractors to exchange roles unpredictably, it has mostly been confined to singleton searches, which typically yield efficient search. We therefore resorted to two singleton searches known to yield relatively inefficient performance, that is, searches in which the target does not pop out. Participants searched for a veridical angry face among neutral ones or vice-versa, either upright or inverted (Experiment 1) or for a Q among Os or vice-versa (Experiment 2). In both experiments, we found substantial intertrial priming that did not improve search efficiency. In addition, intertrial priming was asymmetric and occurred only when the more salient target repeated. We conclude that intertrial priming does not modulate attentional priority allocation and that it occurs in asymmetric search only when the target is characterized by an additional feature that is consciously perceived.
Highlights
Recent research has demonstrated that attention is directed by past experience: how attention is deployed at a certain moment in time greatly affects how attention will be deployed a moment later
We reported that search asymmetry in a facein-the-crowd search manifests with regard to overall RTs and search efficiency and with regard to intertrial priming (Lamy et al, 2008b)
Because examination of target repetition can be conducted only on target-present trials that are preceded by target-present trials, whereas search asymmetry can be examined using all trials, these effects were examined separately
Summary
Recent research has demonstrated that attention is directed by past experience: how attention is deployed at a certain moment in time greatly affects how attention will be deployed a moment later. In the present study we focus on the finding that when observers search for a target with a unique feature on a given dimension among homogenous distractors and the target and distractor features switch unpredictably from trial to trial, responses to the target are faster when the target and distractor features remain the same relative to the preceding trial than when they switch (Maljkovic and Nakayama, 1994; see Kristjánsson and Campana, 2010; Lamy and Kristjánsson, 2013, for reviews) This phenomenon has been generalized to singleton targets defined on various stimulus dimensions and is usually referred to as “Priming of pop-out” (PoP, Maljkovic and Nakayama, 1994). In the remainder of this paper, we use the more general term of “inter-trial priming” to designate the effect of repeating vs. switching the target and distractor features
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