Novel popout without novelty

Abstract

Localization of a novel word in an array with several familiar words is typically enhanced relative to localization in an all-novelarray (between-array novel popout) and sometimes enhanced relative to familiar words in one-novel arrays (within-array novel popout), Christie and Klein (1996) have questioned the reality of the latter effect, suggesting that it may be an artifact of guessing bias, The present Experiment 1 replicated within-array novel popout with the novel word probed at chance (i.e., on only one quarter of trials). Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated a similar popout effect for a categorically unrelated word among three categorically related words, despite superior performance on all-related arrays relative to all-unrelated arrays. Repetition of constant sets of words within the experimental context is therefore unnecessary for a popout effect, contrary to assertions by Johnston and Hawley (1994). Interitem associations appear to be sufficient to produce a popout effect; as such, "novel popout" appears to be a misnomer for a phenomenon that does not depend on novelty.The human mind often seems to favor processing of familiar or expected stimuli, as demonstrated, for example, by semantic priming (Neely, 1977), the word-superiority effect (Reicher, 1969), and frequency effects in word identification (Morton, 1969). At other times, however, novel or unexpected stimuli seem to receive preferential processing relative to familiar stimuli, as demonstrated by perceptual habituation (Sokolov, 1963), semantic satiation (Smith, 1984) and the word-inferiority effect (Healy, 1976). In visual search tasks, locating an unfamiliar target in a background of familiar distractors is easier than locating a familiar target in a background of unfamiliar distractors (Reicher, Snyder, & Richards, 1976). More generally, the mind seems to maintain two simultaneous but opposing biases: to anticipate regularities in the environment, yet to be prepared for violations of those regularities (Grossberg, 1987;Kauffman, 1995).To resolve this paradox, Johnston and Hawley (1994) proposed the mismatch theory, which has antecedents in Sokolov's (1963) dishabituation theory and Grossberg's (1987) adaptive resonance theory. According to the mismatch theory, opposing biases are instantiated at different levels ofprocessing. Higher level "identity nodes" are presumed to be activated by lower level "iconic nodes." The identity nodes are more highly activated for familiar and expected stimuli and may also activate each other through mutual excitatory connections. However, activation of identity nodes produces a top-down inhibition ofWe would like to thank Lauren May and Molly Brown for their assistance with data collection. We also thank William Johnston, Ray Klein, John Christie, and Cheryl Doland for their comments and suggestions on a previous version of this manuscript. Portions of this article were presented at the 38th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Philadelphia. This work was funded by a faculty research grant awarded to 1.A...

Novel popout and familiar popout in a brightness discrimination task

“…The conclusion that novelty itselfdoes not account for the novel-popout effect is consistent with the findings of Diliberto et al (1998). Johnston et al (1993, Experiment 4) had previously found a novel-popout effect only if sets of familiarized words were shown repeatedly in the same arrays.…”

“…Although the results of Diliberto et al (1998) suggest that the interitem associations, not novelty per se, accounts for novel popout, those results are generally consistent with the mismatch theory proposed by Johnston and Hawley (1994). That is, without the mutual lateral excitation of the identity nodes, top-down inhibition of the iconic nodes might be insufficient to suppress perceptual processing ofthe familiar stimuli.…”

“…More recent research (Diliberto, Altarriba, & Neill, 1998, Experiment 1; Johnston & Schwarting, 1997, Experiment 2) has obtained statistically reliable withinarray novel popout under conditions that satisfy this criticism by Christie and Klein (1996)-specifically, by probing the location of the novel word at chance (25%) in the one-novel displays. However, confirmation ofthis effect may not be sufficient to infer that the effect is due to orienting of attention.…”

Short- and long-lasting consequences of novelty, deviance and surprise on brain and cognition

“…This has been called the novel popout phenomenon (Johnston and Schwarting, 1997;Reicher et al, 1976), and is also believed to rely on attentional processes (Strayer and Johnston, 2000). The reliability of the effect, however, has been questioned and the results have also been explained as effects of cognitive load (for a critical view see Christie and Klein, 1996), or inter-item associations (Diliberto et al, 1998).…”

Familiarity seekers are fast and novelty seekers are slow

“…The so-called novel popout effect only occurs in a context containing a group of related items (typically three) and one unique item. This can occur even if the unique item is not differentiated by novelty but only by category, such as not being a tree word among "pine", "oak", and "maple" (Diliberto, Altarriba, & Neill, 1998). The novel popout effect is about novelty as defined by uniqueness in a group.…”