Feature integration in basic detection and localization tasks: Insights from the attentional orienting literature

Abstract

Once presumed to be intimately related, feature integration and the consequences of attentional orienting are now often studied separately. Yet the paradigms used to study each can be highly similar; participants respond to a stimulus, which is then followed by a second stimulus, matching or mismatching the first on some feature(s). Given the similarities between the methods, it seems likely that these fields each could gain insights regarding their own work by looking at the other. Here we note a peculiarity of feature integration research: It relies on paradigms that require or encourage participants to identify the nonspatial features of a stimulus in order to make the correct response. This leaves open the question of whether feature integration effects can be found in tasks that do not require stimulus identity (e.g., color or shape) processing. To answer this question, we reviewed attentional orienting studies that manipulated whether stimulus identity repeated but that required only detection or localization responses, irrespective of stimulus identity. With one exception, feature integration effects were absent from those experiments. Furthermore, we attempted to replicate the exception and found no feature integration effects. Our review shows that detection and localization paradigms are particularly useful for studying the consequences of attentional orienting in the absence of integration effects, and that these same tasks provide a baseline to understand the sources of feature integration effects with only slightly variations in the basic task.

Is attention really biased toward the last target location in visual search? Attention, response rules, distractors, and eye movements

“…1 Theoretically, if this cost could be made larger than the bias against the last target location, there would be a net bias in favor of the last target location. As a secondary point, the previously observed advantage for repeating the target color vanished, as was expected, given that paying attention to color was no longer necessary to find the target (e.g., Goolsby & Suzuki, 2001;Huffman et al, 2018).…”

“…Findings from the visual search literature suggest that a target is identified more efficiently when its location repeats (e.g., Hilchey, Leber, & Pratt, 2018a;Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1996). However, findings from the target-target cueing literature, in which a localization response is made first to a cue and then later to a target, suggest that a target is localized less efficiently when its location repeats (e.g., Huffman, Hilchey, & Pratt, 2018;Kwak & Egeth, 1992). Both literatures claim that their findings reflect bias in the deployment of attention, either toward the previous target location (visual search) or away from it (cueing).…”

Testing the role of response repetition in spatial priming in visual search

“…As such, evidently, at least two processes are needed to account for the full data set here (see also, e.g., Christie & Klein, 2001;Krummenacher et al, 2009;Pratt & Abrams, 1999). We know that this response-independent spatial positive priming effect must be caused, on some level, by whether Bwhat^processing is needed in order to form the correct response, given that responses are slower when the target location repeats in Bwhere^tasks (e.g., Huffman et al, 2018;Maylor & Hockey, 1985;Taylor & Klein, 2000;Welsh & Pratt, 2006). We also know that this spatial positive priming effect is not a mere product of the Bwhat^task, given that eye movements remain slower to prior target locations even when those eye movements are expressly for the purpose of obtaining identity information for a key-press response (Hilchey, Rajsic, et al, 2018).…”

“…As far as the response-dependent spatial priming effects go, we believe that they likely reflect decisionmaking heuristics that are confined to effectors involved in actualizing judgments about target identity information (e.g., Hilchey, Rajsic, et al, 2018;. Basically, when stimuli have to be identified in order to form a response, the prior target location and key-press response are presumed linked together to form some sort of implicit memory trace (e.g., Hommel, 2004;Huffman et al, 2018). When the target location repeats, the recently associated response is rapidly retrieved and reactivated, after the target location has been oriented to (Hilchey, Rajsic, et al, 2018;Hilchey et al, 2017b).…”

Effects of Visual Scene Complexity on Neural Signatures of Spatial Attention

“…In vision, attention is often deployed to a spatial location, either via bottom-up guided cues or via top-down volitional (endogenous) direction of attention (Posner, 1980;Posner et al, 1980;Rosen et al, 2014;Huffman et al, 2018;Wolfe and Utochkin, 2019). Once a location is attended, visual features at that location, such as color, shape, and orientation, are integrated and perceived as belonging to whole objects (Treisman and Gelade, 1980;Shinn-Cunningham, 2008;Humphreys, 2016).…”