Visual marking: prioritizing selection for new objects by top-down attentional inhibition of old objects.

Abstract

The authors propose a new mechanism for prioritizing the selection of new events: visual marking. In a modified conjunction search task the authors presented one set of distractors before the remaining items, which contained the target if present. Search was as efficient as if only the second items were presented. This held when eye movements were prevented and required a gap of 400 ms between the old and new items. The effect was abolished by luminance changes at old distractor locations when the new items appeared, and it was reduced by the addition of an attention demanding load task. The authors propose that old items can be ignored by spatially parallel, top-down attentional inhibition applied to the locations of static stimuli. The authors discuss the relations between marking and other accounts of visual selection and potential neurophysiological mechanisms.