Is there feature-based attentional selection in visual search?

Abstract

A new paradigm combines attentional cuing and rapid serial visual presentation to disentangle the effects of perceptual filtering and location selection. Observers search successive, superimposed arrays, in which feature values are alternated for a target numeral among letters. Two dimensions, size (small, large) and color (red, green) are tested. Selective attention to feature values is jointly manipulated by instructions, presentation probabilities, and payoffs. In Experiment 1, the attended feature provides temporal, not spatial, information; observers show no attentional costs or benefits in response accuracy. In Experiment 2, the attended feature indicates a unique location; observers show consistent attentional costs and benefits. Selective attention to a particular size or color does not cause perceptual exclusion or admission of items containing that feature; it acts by guiding search processes to spatial locations that contain the to-be-attended feature.

The role of spatial and nonspatial information in visual selection

“…In conditions in which the elements in a single frame had the same color and the expected nonspatial feature provided temporal but not spatial information, participants could not use this information to improve performance. Similar to van der Heijden (1993), Shih and Sperling (1996) concluded that nonspatial information does not directly affect visual selection but only guides spatial attention to the relevant location.…”

“…As shown by van der Heijden (1993), the nonspatial information points to a location in the display (similar to a bar-marker indicating a location); and, ultimately, location is used as a means to select the relevant item (see also, Tsal & Lavie, 1988). Shih and Sperling (1996) came to a similar conclusion. They used a rapid visual serial presentation paradigm consisting of superimposed stimulus arrays.…”

Attention to Features Precedes Attention to Locations in Visual Search: Evidence from Electromagnetic Brain Responses in Humans

“…A number of behavioral and electrophysiological findings in the literature are in line with this conclusion. For example, it has been shown that items at nontarget locations attract attention in visual search to the extent that they bear features of the searched-for set (Kim and Cave, 1995;Shui-I and Sperling, 1996;Theeuwes and Burger, 1998;Woodman and Luck, 1999;Arnott et al, 2001;Theeuwes et al, 2001). In particular, Folk and colleagues (Folk et al, 1992(Folk et al, , 1994(Folk et al, , 2002Folk and Remington, 1998) and others (Yantis and Egeth, 1999) have shown that distractors matching the attentional set are highly effective at capturing attention when attention is not already strongly focused on a different location.…”

“…Feature-based location maps of various kinds have been postulated in many theories of visual search (Treisman and Gelade, 1980;Treisman and Sato, 1990;Wolfe, 1994;Cave, 1999), and behavioral studies have demonstrated that attending to features provides access to their spatial locations Cave, 1995, 2001;Shui-I and Sperling, 1996). Once relevant features have been located, spatial attention may then be allocated to the locations containing those features (Wolfe et al, 1989;Treisman and Sato, 1990), and this may then allow a suppression of information from the other locations, improving the perceptual analysis at attended locations (Chelazzi et al, 1993;Luck et al, 1997a).…”

An ecological approach to cognitive (im)penetrability

“…However, not all properties are created equal. It now appears that if a subject is instructed to attend to, say, the red items in a display, this neither enhances the sensory quality of the red items, nor causes non-red items to be excluded from subsequent processing (e.g., Moore & Egeth 1998;Shih & Sperling 1996; see also Prinzmetal et al 1998, for a discussion of the minimal effects of attention on the appearance of items). Attention does affect the priority of the red items; attending to red may mean simply that spatial attention is directed to those items earlier than they would be without the instruction.…”