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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.

We present novel evidence showing that new self-relevant visual associations can affect performance in simple shape recognition tasks. Participants associated labels for themselves, other people, or neutral terms with geometric shapes and then immediately judged whether subsequent label-shape pairings were matched. Across 4 experiments there was a reliable self-prioritization benefit on response times and perceptual sensitivity that remained across different presentation contexts (with self, best friend, and unfamiliar others in Experiment 1; with self, best friend, and neutral terms, and with self, mother, and neutral terms in Experiments 2A and 2B, respectively. Control studies in Experiment 3 indicated that the results did not reflect the length, concreteness, or familiarity of the words. The self-prioritization effect on shape matching also increased when stimuli were degraded (self shapes showing weaker effects of degradation) in Experiment 4A, consistent with self-information modulating perceptual processing. A similar effect was found when people associated different reward values to the shape in Experiment 4B. The results indicate that associating a stimulus to the self modulates its subsequent perceptual processing, and this may operate by self-associated shapes automatically evoking the reward system.

Four experiments explored the interrelations between working memory, attention, and eye movements. Observers had to identify a tilted line amongst vertical distractors. Each line was surrounded by a colored shape that could be precued by a matching item held in memory. Relative to a neutral baseline, in which no shapes matched the memory item, search was more efficient when the memory cue matched the shape containing the target, and it was less efficient when the cued stimulus contained a distractor. Cuing affected the shortest reaction times and the first saccade in search. The effect occurred even when the memory cue was always invalid but not when the cue did not have to be held in memory. There was also no evidence for priming effects between consecutive trials. The results suggest that there can be early, involuntary top-down directing of attention to a stimulus matching the contents of working memory.

No abstract