Precuing benefits for color and location in a visual search task

Abstract

Selection in multiple-item displays has been shown to benefit immensely from advance knowledge of target location (e.g., Henderson, 1991), leading to the suggestion that location is completely dominant in visual selective attention (e.g., Tsal & Lavie, 1993). Recently, direct selection by color has been reported in displays in which location does not vary (Vierck & Miller, 2005). The present experiment investigated the possibility of independent selection by color in a task with multiple-item displays and location precues in order to see whether color is also used for selection even when target location does vary and supposedly dominant location precues can be used. Precues provided independent information about the location and color of a target, and each type of precue could be either valid or invalid. The precues were followed by brief displays of six letters in six different colors, and participants had to discriminate the case of a prespecified target letter (e.g., R vs. r). Performance was much better when location cues were valid than when they were invalid, confirming the large advantage associated with valid advance location information. Performance was also better with valid advance color information, however, both when location cues were valid and when they were invalid. But these color benefits were dependent on the closeness of the colored letter to the cued location. Our results thus suggest that selection by color in a multiple-item display, where location and color information are independent from each other and equalized, is mediated by location information.

Space, color, and direction of movement: How do they affect attention?

“…Results of previous psychophysical studies that used visual search tasks are also consistent with our findings (Meeter & Theeuwes, 2006;Theeuwes & Van der Burg, 2007;Vierck & Miller, 2008). However, these studies were not designed to compare location versus featurebased effects and instead strongly argued that featurebased attention has no effect on the top-down selection process.…”

Finding a link between guided search and perceptual load theory

“…This difference allowed colour knowledge to better parse the display into relevant and irrelevant items than the spatial knowledge about the task. In turn, greater reliance upon colour knowledge resulted in a greater impact on selection despite some evidence that location should have been the dominant factor in visual selection for a paradigm with multiple stimuli locations (Vierck & Miller, 2008). It is an interesting disparity, and indicates that colour might be able to influence both guidance and selection under some scenarios.…”

How the Strength of a Strong Object Mask Varies in Space and Time When it is Used as an Uninformative Singleton in Visual Search for Target Location

“…It is widely believed that reliable and explicit visual recognition depends critically on whether selective attention can participate in the processing of object information. This standpoint has been repeatedly advocated in the many studies of visual search and attentional cueing (e.g., Cheal, & Lyon, 1991;Davoli, Suszko, & Abrams, 2007;Di Lollo, Enns, & Rensink, 2000;Gibson et al, 2008;Kahneman, & Treisman, 1984;Kawahara, & Miyatani, 2001;Müller & Krummenacher, 2006;Vierck, & Miller, 2008;Yantis, & Jonides, 1990). However, it is not unanimously clear whether the perception-improving or impairing selective attention can be attracted also automatically by uninformative singleton objects appearing somewhere in the visual field (Müller & Krummenacher, 2006;Yeh, & Liao, 2010).…”