Do images involuntarily trigger search? A test of Pillsbury’s hypothesis

Abstract

Pillsbury (1908) suggested that deciding to search for something in a scene consists of nothing more than forming a visual image of the target. If so, imaging should trigger search even when it would be more advantageous not to search. Subjects were cued to form an image of a specified object (e.g., tiger) and to press a key when they had done so. This initiated the presentation of a sequence of pictures, with a single target digit interspersed; the subject's task was to report this digit. The sequence contained a picture of the same type of object that the subject had just imaged (e.g., a tiger), either before or after the target digit. If this picture was detected involuntarily, an attentional blink should have impaired digit detection when the picture preceded the digit. This was confirmed in two experiments, even when instructions specifically encouraged subjects to discard the image and to avoid searching for it. The results support Pillsbury's hypothesis.

Working memory and the guidance of visual attention: Consonance-driven orienting

“…This tendency illustrates what we have termed consonance-driven orienting. This finding is consistent with previous reports (Downing, 2000;Pashler & Shiu, 1999). However, the present work goes well beyond those studies in showing that consonance-driven orienting can play a decisive role in the control of attention.…”

“…When no competing top-down set is in place, it appears that consonance-driven orienting can easily play a decisive role in attention control: In Experiment 1B, the consonance-driven orienting increased the chance of reporting the critical shape from the chance level (33%) to 77%. The results also go beyond the work of Pashler and Shiu (1999) and Downing (2000) in showing that the effects "spread" to encompass inputs that are semantically related to the primes. In Experiment 2, in which prime and critical word were linked only by a semantic association, the probability still increased to 40%.…”

“…In a test of one aspect of the notion of consonance-driven orienting, Pashler and Shiu (1999) instructed subjects to form a mental image of an object (e.g., a tiger). Subjects then viewed a rapid serial presentation of eight line drawings.…”

“…Taking this idea a bit further, some have recently suggested that the activation of semantic representationswhether conscious or unconscious, whether resulting from immediate sensory inputs or from internal trains of stimulus-independent thought-may cause attention to be drawn toward any stimuli in the sensory fields that would tend themselves to activate related concepts (Moores, Laiti, & Chelazzi, 2003;Pashler & Shiu, 1999). This notion (which will be termed consonance-driven orienting) can be summarized crudely as the principle "attend to any object that is in any way related to any currently active mental contents."…”

Prefrontal attention and multiple reference frames during working memory in primates

“…It is generally agreed that the PFC plays a critical role in attention and working memory, which activation is positively correlated with the load of object WM [19]. Attention broadly participate in manipulation and updating of contents in working memory, and the temporary information preservation and manipulation in working memory are also essential components to attention, for example, some studies [20] showed that forming a visual image of a target will facilitate the visual search, in another words, the act of preparing to search might consist, not in some mental operation specific to search per se, but merely in forming a mental image of the target to be searched for. Anatomically studies indicate that mediate working memory and selective attention show a striking degree of overlap in neural substrates [21].…”