Abstract
Previous research has shown that repetition of a task-relevant attention-capturing feature facilitates popout search. This priming of pop-out effect is due to some residual memory from recent trials. We explore two possible mechanisms of priming of pop-out: a top-down attentional benefit from a memory of the previous target representation that is stored in visual short-term memory (VSTM) and a bottom-up change of attentional gains from perceptual features of the previously attended target. We manipulated participants’ ability to form a memory trace in VSTM by occupying it with a distractor task and found that occupying VSTM did not interfere with priming of pop-out. We next manipulated attentional gains associated with feature values by inserting an irrelevant task between pop-out searches. We found that the color of the target from the intervening perceptual task influenced pop-out search: The current pop-out search was facilitated when the intervening task’s target matched the target color of the pop-out search. These results suggest that priming of pop-out might not be due to a memory trace of the previous targets in VSTM but, rather, might be due to changes in attentional control based on priming from relatively low-level feature representations of previously attended objects.
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This research was made possible by National Science Foundation Grant 03-39171 awarded to M.C.M. and S.P.V.
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Lee, H., Mozer, M.C. & Vecera, S.P. Mechanisms of priming of pop-out: Stored representations or feature-gain modulations?. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71, 1059–1071 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.71.5.1059
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.71.5.1059