Precue effects in visual search: Data or resource limited?

Abstract

Precuing an observer as to where a target is more likely to occur in a subsequent visual array can increase the detectability (d') of a target at that location. This is often attributed to the observer's increased allocation of some limited cognitive resource ("attention") to the cued location. Two experiments are reported which are difficult to interpret in this way even though they involve similar cue effects. The first involves postcuing a location well after the array but before the observer responds, so that the cue can influence the response but not the observation. The second involves precuing, but with slow sequential presentation of array elements prior to the response, so the observer need not share any limited resource while processing each element in turn. Enhanced detectability similar to that produced with precues and simultaneous presentation of elements is shown to occur in each experiment. An alternative data-limited (rather than resource-limited) interpretation of these effects is provided by a mathematical model in which the observer integrates equally noisy or degraded internal representations of the array elements, but gives more weight to cued elements in selecting a response. Theoretical parameters of the model are shown to provide separate measures of both an observer's overall sensitivity and precue effects in cost-benefit analyses of cuing data.

The scaling of spatial attention in visual search and its modification in healthy aging

“…In this view, the kind of set size effects taken as evidence for serial deployment of covert attention could also arise from capacity limits in parallel processing (Townsend & Ashby, 1984) or from reductions in discriminabilitydue to increased noise in the decision process (Kinchla, Chen, & Evert, 1995;Shaw, 1984). Applying such interpretations to the present study, cue size effects might have arisen from modulation of the noise in the decision process by changingthe effective set size.…”

Bayesian accounts of covert selective attention: A tutorial review

“…One way to summarise how this combination-step works is that the sensory information is weighted by the prior belief. However, it is not the noisy sensory information itself which is weighted (as in Kinchla (1977) and Kinchla, Chen, and Evert (1995), and SDT models), but it is the likelihood of the sensory data which is combined with the prior belief (Shimozaki et al, 2003;Vincent et al, 2009). …”

Evidence against signal enhancement as a mechanism of direct selection by color

“…According to this view, precuing benefits can be conceived of as a statistical phenomenon (e.g., Kinchla, Chen, & Evert, 1995). When distractor items are present in the field, participants may incorrectly confuse one of these with a target, because of perceptual noise.…”

“…A location precue allows the observer to give extra weight to the perceptual information from the location likely to contain the target (cf. Kinchla et al, 1995), reducing the likelihood of confusions caused by distractor items in unlikely locations, and it therefore leads to a performance benefit in valid trials. In invalid trials, however, more mistakes and slower responses are likely, because extra weight is given to the distractor item at the cued location.…”