Abstract
While attentional effects in visual selection tasks have traditionally been assigned “top-down” or “bottom-up” origins, more recently it has been proposed that there are three major factors affecting visual selection: (1) physical salience, (2) current goals and (3) selection history. Here, we look further into selection history by investigating Priming of Pop-out (POP) and the Distractor Preview Effect (DPE), two inter-trial effects that demonstrate the influence of recent history on visual search performance. Using the Ratcliff diffusion model, we model observed saccadic selections from an oddball search experiment that included a mix of both POP and DPE conditions. We find that the Ratcliff diffusion model can effectively model the manner in which selection history affects current attentional control in visual inter-trial effects. The model evidence shows that bias regarding the current trial's most likely target color is the most critical parameter underlying the effect of selection history. Our results are consistent with the view that the 3-item color-oddball task used for POP and DPE experiments is best understood as an attentional decision making task.
Highlights
Many studies have demonstrated that the attention system is extremely sensitive to recent experiences of attentional selection and deployment
This study aimed to clarify the mechanisms underlying the attentional modulations caused by selection history, in particular by examining Priming of Pop-out (POP) and the Distractor Preview Effect (DPE)
We fit the Ratcliff diffusion model (RDM) to eye movement data from an experiment that included a mix of POP and DPE search conditions where the oddball was defined by the item with a unique color in the search array
Summary
Many studies have demonstrated that the attention system is extremely sensitive to recent experiences of attentional selection and deployment. One demonstration is that responding to a red target among green distractors is faster on trial N, when there was the same target and distractor color assignment on trial N-1 (the Search Repeated condition), compared to when they switched assignments (i.e., the target was green among red distractors, the Search Switched condition [5,6,7]). The Distractor Preview Effect (DPE) [20,21,22,23,24], in contrast, describes how search performance deteriorates (i.e. search becomes slower and less accurate) when the current target features were associated with non-target status on the preceding trial. Responding to a red target among green distractors is slower on trial N, when on trial N-1 all objects were red (red was associated with non-target status) compared to when all objects were green
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