Modeling the Effect of Selection History on Pop-Out Visual Search

Abstract

While attentional effects in visual selection tasks have traditionally been assigned “top-down” or “bottom-up” origins, more recently it has been proposed that there are three major factors affecting visual selection: (1) physical salience, (2) current goals and (3) selection history. Here, we look further into selection history by investigating Priming of Pop-out (POP) and the Distractor Preview Effect (DPE), two inter-trial effects that demonstrate the influence of recent history on visual search performance. Using the Ratcliff diffusion model, we model observed saccadic selections from an oddball search experiment that included a mix of both POP and DPE conditions. We find that the Ratcliff diffusion model can effectively model the manner in which selection history affects current attentional control in visual inter-trial effects. The model evidence shows that bias regarding the current trial's most likely target color is the most critical parameter underlying the effect of selection history. Our results are consistent with the view that the 3-item color-oddball task used for POP and DPE experiments is best understood as an attentional decision making task.

Exploring the contributions of spatial and non-spatial working memory to priming of pop-out

“…We also replicated the absence of an effect of loading non-spatial VWM on PoP. We interpreted these findings within the context of recent findings from our lab that have suggested that the targets in three-item color oddball tasks actually do not systematically pop out (Buetti et al, 2016;Tseng et al, 2014), but actually require an attentive comparison to determine which item is different from the other two before attention can be focused on that one oddball item. This is a substantially longer process than simply moving attention toward a known pop-out (Buetti et al, 2016) or toward a sudden onset (Hollingworth et al, 2013).…”

“…In that sense, Bpriming of pop-out^is a misnomer. Rather, in Tseng et al (2014) we proposed that the oddball task (with a threeitem display) can be understood as an attention/decision-making task. Because the target fails to pop out and participants cannot anticipate a priori what color the target will be, they must attend to all three items and compare them to decide which of the three is different from the other two.…”

“…As such, spatial attention only (ever) deploys to one location (the target location), after the initial low-level analysis of the scene is completed. In contrast to this view, Tseng et al (2014) proposed that the color-oddball task could be understood (and modeled) as an attentional decision task, in which attention is actually actively involved in evaluating all items in the display, at least in displays with small set sizes like 3 (the set size used in Maljkovic & Nakayama's, 1994, initial study). The evidence accumulates in this model not toward a perceptual decision (Bis this item red?^) but rather toward a functional decision (Bis this the target color?^).…”

“…In other words, maxing out non-spatial VWM capacity may not necessarily interfere with attentional selection during visual search. That said, if, as proposed by Buetti et al (2016), performance in the color-oddball task is not driven by Bfeatural^contrast, but instead requires some degree of attention to all three items in the display (to figure out which item is different from the other two; see also Tseng et al, 2014), then loading spatial VWM may in fact have a substantial effect on PoP by interfering with participants' ability to attend to and compare those items. The goals of the present study were therefore to follow up on the Lee et al study and to explore whether loading spatial VWM does indeed reduce PoP in a load-dependent manner.…”

Not all “distractor” tags are created equal: using a search asymmetry to dissociate the inter-trial effects caused by different forms of distractors

“…This cannot be easily determined when only two features are used in the search task and both produce pop-out effects [as in ((s))Tseng et al (2014) study and many of the early PoP studies]. Proposing that attentional decisions are different on target-present and target-absent trials is not a new concept.…”