Inhibitory tagging is a process that prevents focal attention from revisiting previously checked items in inefficient searches, facilitating search performance. Recent studies suggested that inhibitory tagging is object rather than location based, but it was unclear whether inhibitory tagging operates on moving objects. The present study investigated the tagging effect on moving objects. Participants were asked to search for a moving target among randomly and independently moving distractors. After either efficient or inefficient search, participants performed a probe detection task that measured the inhibitory effect on search items. The inhibitory effect on distractors was observed only after inefficient searches. The present results support the concept of object-based inhibitory tagging.

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Jiang and Wagner (2004) demonstrated that individual target-distractor associations were learned in contextual cuing. We examined whether individual associations can be learned in efficient visual searches that do not involve attentional deployment to individual search items. In Experiment 1, individual associations were not learned during the efficient search tasks. However, in Experiment 2, where additional exposure duration of the search display was provided by presenting placeholders marking future locations of the search items, individual associations were successfully learned in the efficient search tasks and transferred to inefficient search. Moreover, Experiment 3 demonstrated that a concurrent task requiring attention does not affect the learning of the local visual context. These results clearly showed that attentional deployment is not necessary for learning individual locations and clarified how the human visual system extracts and preserves regularity in complex visual environments for efficient visual information processing.

We investigated whether implicit learning in a visual search task would influence preferences for visual stimuli. Participants performed a contextual cueing task in which they searched for visual targets, the locations of which were either predicted or not predicted by the positioning of distractors. The speed with which participants located the targets increased across trials more rapidly for predictive displays than for non-predictive displays, consistent with contextual cueing. Participants were subsequently asked to rate the "goodness" of visual displays. The rating results showed that they preferred predictive displays to both non-predictive and novel displays. The participants did not recognize predictive displays any more frequently than they did non-predictive or novel displays. These results suggest that contextual cueing occurred implicitly and that the implicit learning of visual layouts promotes a preference for visual layouts that are predictive of target location.