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Because they were used for decades to present visual stimuli in psychophysical and psychophysiological studies, cathode ray tubes (CRTs) used to be the gold standard for stimulus presentation in vision research. Recently, as CRTs have become increasingly rare in the market, researchers have started using various types of liquid-crystal display (LCD) monitors as a replacement for CRTs. However, LCDs are typically not cost-effective when used in vision research and often cannot reach the full capacity of a high refresh rate. In this study we measured the temporal and spatial characteristics of a consumer-grade LCD, and the results suggested that a consumer-grade LCD can successfully meet all the technical demands in vision research. The tested LCD, working in a flash style like that of CRTs, demonstrated perfect consistency for initial latencies across locations, yet showed poor spatial uniformity and sluggishness in reaching the requested luminance within the first frame. After these drawbacks were addressed through software corrections, the candidate monitor showed performance comparable or superior to that of CRTs in terms of both spatial and temporal homogeneity. The proposed solution can be used as a replacement for CRTs in vision research.

Previous studies have shown that attention becomes biased toward those locations that frequently contain a target and is biased away from locations that have a high probability to contain a distractor. A recent study showed that participants also learned regularities that exist across trials: Participants were faster to find the singleton when its location was predicted by the location of the target singleton on the previous trial. Note, however, that this across-trial statistical learning was only demonstrated for parallel search involving “pop-out” singleton targets. The current study investigated whether there is also learning of across-trial regularities when search is serial, using a T-among-Ls task. In Experiment 1, using search displays with a gray T-target among gray Ls, we found that participants did not learn the existing across-trial regularities. In Experiment 2 we used the same display and same regularities except that during the first half of the experiment the targets were colored red, allowing feature search. Critically, now participants did learn the across-trial regularities during pop-out feature search and the learned biases persisted when search was serial again. Participants were not aware of these regularities suggesting that learning was automatic and implicit. We propose that across-trial target-target associations learned during feature search shape a flexible priority map whereby the selection of the predicting location results in up-weighting of the predicted location on the next trial. This flexible priority map remained active even when search task changed dramatically from parallel to serial search.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower responses to targets at a previously cued location than that at an uncued location. The time course of IOR has long been a topic of interest in the field. Investigations into the time course of IOR are typically performed by examining the magnitude of IOR under various cue-target onset asynchrony (CTOA) conditions. Therefore, the results are vulnerable to influence of factors that could affect the target processes (e.g., the frequency of the target type). In the present study, steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) were implemented to directly take a continuous measurement of the degree to which cued location is processed, eliminating the influence mentioned above. The results indicate that, relative to the baseline interval (−400 to 0 ms), the presence of peripheral cues generated a typical two-stage effect on the SSVEP amplitude evoked by a 20 Hz flicker. Specifically, after the onset of the peripheral cues, the SSVEP amplitude first showed a significant increase, which subsequently turned into a significant inhibition effect after 200 ms. These results provide a continuous time course diagram of the cueing effect and suggest an effective way for future investigations of controlling the masking effects of target stimuli processing on IOR.

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