Abstract
Previous research has investigated whether visual salience (i.e., how much an item stands out) or perceptual load (i.e., display complexity) is the dominant factor in visual selective attention. The evidence has been mixed, with some findings supporting a dominant role for visual salience and some findings supporting a dominant role for perceptual load. However, the complex displays used to impose high perceptual load also introduce a third factor that has gone understudied until recently: the interplay between identity dilution and exposure duration. Adding display items to increase perceptual load dilutes a distractor's identity, which could decrease interference, but the task generally takes longer, which could increase distractor interference. To clarify how these factors interact, the present study used converging measures of distractor interference—both compatibility and singleton presence—to disambiguate effects due to salience, perceptual load, and identity dilution/exposure duration. Compatibility effects support perceptual load as the dominant factor, whereas singleton presence effects do not (Experiment 1). Consistent with salience-based mechanisms, significant distractor processing (both compatibility and presence effects) occurred under high perceptual load when singleton present trials preceded singleton absent trials (Experiment 2A). However, consistent with load-based mechanisms, non-significant compatibility effects occurred under high perceptual load when singleton absent trials preceded singleton present trials (Experiment 2B). Thus, the competition between salience-based and load-based mechanisms depended on the amount of prior experience with singleton present vs. absent displays, which in turn depended on the use of broad vs. narrow attentional allocation strategies. These experience-dependent effects provide further evidence that attention allocation strategies are contingent on factors such as task context and experience.
Highlights
Previous research has investigated whether visual salience or perceptual load is the dominant factor in visual selective attention
Salience could explain why the singleton distractor presence effects were stronger under high perceptual load if we assume that, since all items are processed under low perceptual load anyway, salience is a much more important issue for the limited processing available under high perceptual load
Some evidence does suggest that distractor rejection can depend upon prior experience (Leber and Egeth, 2006a,b; Vatterott and Vecera, 2012), which would indicate that exposure is more important to consider across the experiment rather than during a single trial or only under high perceptual load
Summary
Previous research has investigated whether visual salience (i.e., how much an item stands out) or perceptual load (i.e., display complexity) is the dominant factor in visual selective attention. Consistent with salience-based mechanisms, significant distractor processing (both compatibility and presence effects) occurred under high perceptual load when singleton present trials preceded singleton absent trials (Experiment 2A). When the number of relevant items is relatively large, perceptual resources do not spill over to the distractor because they are fully consumed in processing the relevant items, typically resulting in non-significant distractor interference, or early selection This idea remains the predominant view of visual selection as it appears to settle the long standing debate of early vs late selection This is supposedly because focal attention can be captured in a reflexive fashion by salient objects and events in the world In this view, significant distractor interference should be observed regardless of the number of relevant items because the salience of a uniquelycolored distractor remains high across any load manipulation. Some evidence suggests that salience can dominate load when low and high load displays are presented in separate blocks, as reflected by equal amounts of distractor interference observed across display load (Biggs and Gibson, 2010, Experiment 2)
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