The role of search difficulty in intertrial feature priming

Lamy, Dominique; Zivony, Alon; Yashar, Amit

doi:10.1016/j.visres.2011.07.010

Cited by 38 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Our results show that intertrial feature priming interacts with repetition of the motor response and that, although repetition of the response attribute improves search performance, it does not modulate the magnitude of intertrial priming. Finally, our results replicate the findings reported by Lamy et al (2011) by showing that the response-related component of intertrial feature priming is more likely to be observed when the search is difficult.…”

Section: Summary Of the Findingssupporting

confidence: 91%

“…This finding led us to conclude that the postselection component of feature priming reflects a heuristic strategy that observers tend to use when the search is difficult. The present finding that color repetition interacts with repetition of the motor response but not with repetition of the response attribute suggests that when the search context on the current trial (i.e., the target and distractor colors; see Lamy et al, 2011) is similar to that of the previous trial, participants are more likely to reactivate the motor response associated with the previous trial.…”

Section: Summary Of the Findingsmentioning

confidence: 54%

“…The selectionbased effect is followed by a postselection effect, manifested in the interaction between intertrial feature priming and response repetition (Lamy et al, 2010). In a previous study (Lamy et al, 2011), we showed that this late component emerges when the search is difficult, but also when the search is easy and the conditions of search difficulty are unpredictable (i.e., when easy and difficult search trials are mixed). This finding led us to conclude that the postselection component of feature priming reflects a heuristic strategy that observers tend to use when the search is difficult.…”

Section: Summary Of the Findingsmentioning

confidence: 61%

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Refining the dual-stage account of intertrial feature priming: Does motor response or response feature matter?

Yashar

Lamy

2011

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Numerous studies have shown that repetition of search-relevant attributes facilitates visual search performance. For example, Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) showed that when observers search for a target defined by its color and report its shape, repetition of the target color speeds search, an effect known as priming of pop-out. While intertrial feature priming in search was initially thought to affect perceptual processes, the idea that it also affects postselection stages of processing is increasingly acknowledged. However, because in previous studies repetition of the motor response has typically been confounded with repetition of the response feature, it is not clear what mechanisms underlie the postselection effect of intertrial priming. In the present study, we dissociated the two repetition types. The results showed that repetition of the target-defining attribute from the previous trial affects selection of the motor response but not discrimination of the response attribute. The implications for current accounts of intertrial priming are discussed.Keywords Visual search . Attention . Memory . Repetition effects . Response selection In daily-life situations, observers are required to continuously search the environment and quickly extract relevant information from complex and detailed scenes. A simple example for this is when one searches for a desired product among the diversity of products on a supermarket shelf. At each moment during the search, one has to decide which items to ignore and which to attend to. Without some context of previous decisions the search process would be inefficient, because one would have to make the same decisions over and over again. A mechanism that may provide context and continuity during search is an implicit short-term memory store of previous attentional decisions.

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Section: Summary Of the Findingssupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Summary Of the Findingsmentioning

confidence: 54%

Section: Summary Of the Findingsmentioning

confidence: 61%

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Refining the dual-stage account of intertrial feature priming: Does motor response or response feature matter?

Yashar

Lamy

2011

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Other studies have also shown that when search becomes difficult, priming may play a less dominant role than strategy based top-down search (e.g. [71]). …”

Section: Feature-based Attention and Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Feature-based attention: it is all bottom-up priming

Theeuwes

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

137

119

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Feature-based attention (FBA) enhances the representation of image characteristics throughout the visual field, a mechanism that is particularly useful when searching for a specific stimulus feature. Even though most theories of visual search implicitly or explicitly assume that FBA is under top-down control, we argue that the role of top-down processing in FBA may be limited. Our review of the literature indicates that all behavioural and neuro-imaging studies investigating FBA suffer from the shortcoming that they cannot rule out an effect of priming. The mere attending to a feature enhances the mandatory processing of that feature across the visual field, an effect that is likely to occur in an automatic, bottom-up way. Studies that have investigated the feasibility of FBA by means of cueing paradigms suggest that the role of top-down processing in FBA is limited (e.g. prepare for red). Instead, the actual processing of the stimulus is needed to cause the mandatory tuning of responses throughout the visual field. We conclude that it is likely that all FBA effects reported previously are the result of bottom-up priming.

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“…An important implication of this hybrid view is that recent studies showing that episodic retrieval can impact singleton search performance from one trial to the next does not preclude the presence of early perceptual-processing benefits that are due to activation/ suppression mechanisms. Although the details of when one or the other process is responsible for PoP effects require additional study, it has also been suggested that episodic influences tend to be expressed in performance when search stimuli can be perceived as integrated objects (Kristjánsson, Ingvarsdóttir, & Teitsdóttir, 2008) or when target-distractor discriminability is low, thus making search less efficient (Asgeirsson & Kristjánsson 2011;Lamy, Zivony, & Yashar, 2011;.…”

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confidence: 99%

Perceptual distinctiveness produces long-lasting priming of pop-out

Thomson

Milliken

2012

Psychon Bull Rev

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Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) demonstrated memory influences in singleton search from one trial to the next, an effect they termed priming of pop-out (PoP). This effect was described as resulting from the persistence of an implicit memory trace, the influence of which could be observed for around five to eight subsequent trials. The seemingly short-lived nature of this priming effect has been attributed to decay of the underlying memory representation that occurs when attention is directed to intervening search items, even when such items are perceptually dissimilar from the search trials upon which PoP is measured (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 2000). The present study reexamines the role of perceptual similarity as a mechanism of interference by examining the influence on PoP of rare search trials that were perceptually distinct with respect to the other, common trials. Long-lasting (n − 16) PoP was observed for rare trials that were composed of distinct target/distractor colors, suggesting that PoP can be observed across at least twice as many trials as has previously been reported. Thus, the time span across which PoP can be measured depends heavily on the nature of the intervening search displays, a result that must be accommodated by current theoretical accounts of PoP. Keywords Priming . Visual search . Memory and attentionVisual search processes are fundamental to the selection of relevant information in our perceptual environment. Although visual search is ubiquitous in everyday life, the nature of the underlying mechanisms that allow us to search efficiently remains a topic of intense scientific study. This study is aimed in particular at the nature of the processes that contribute to efficient (or pop-out) search performance. Although pop-out search was once thought of as depending entirely on preattentive perceptual processing (Treisman & Gelade 1980), a growing body of evidence suggests that it is also affected by shortterm memory representations. Assessing the seemingly shortlived nature of memory representations in singleton search was the primary purpose of the work reported here.In a series of experiments, using a task first developed by

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The role of search difficulty in intertrial feature priming

Cited by 38 publications

References 31 publications

Refining the dual-stage account of intertrial feature priming: Does motor response or response feature matter?

Refining the dual-stage account of intertrial feature priming: Does motor response or response feature matter?

Feature-based attention: it is all bottom-up priming

Perceptual distinctiveness produces long-lasting priming of pop-out

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