Visual search for color and shape: When is the gaze guided by feature relationships, when by feature values?

Becker, Stefanie I.; Harris, Anthony M.; Venini, Dustin; Retell, James D.

doi:10.1037/a0033489

Cited by 55 publications

(122 citation statements)

References 106 publications

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“…This suggests that when contexts render visual search relatively robust against repeated distraction by salient stimuli, a repetition of the distracting feature does not further decrease attentional capture and thus does not further improve search performance. In line with this, it was previously found in an eye-tracking study that repeating an irrelevant distractor color did not alter saccade trajectories in a homogeneous context when color changes were unpredictable (Becker et al, 2014). Search displays with heterogeneous contexts, however, can benefit from repetition of an irrelevant distractor feature, but only if the color is systematically varying.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Distractor-intertrial Primingsupporting

confidence: 57%

Intertrial priming due to distractor repetition is eliminated in homogeneous contexts

Feldmann-Wüstefeld

Schubö

2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Targets are found more easily in a visual search task when their feature is repeatedly presented, an effect known as intertrial priming. Recent findings suggest that priming of distractors can also improve search performance by facilitated suppression of repeated distractor features. The efficacy of intertrial priming for targets can be potentiated by the expectancy of a specific target feature; systematic repetition shows larger intertrial priming than random repetition. For distractors, the underlying mechanism is less clear. We used the systematic lateralization approach to disentangle target-and distractorrelated processing with subcomponents of the N2pc. We found no modulation of the N T component, which reflects prioritization of target processing. The N D component, which reflects attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli, however, showed intertrial priming: N D monotonically decreased with repetition of a distractor color, but only if a specific distractor feature was expected, and if the context induced a search that was vulnerable to attentional capture. These observations suggest that distractor priming only improves visual search if volitional control is relatively high. The results also suggest that intertrial priming for distractors is due to decreased attentional capture by repeatedly presented distractors, whereas target processing remains unaffected. To cope with the vast amount of incoming information, the visual system selects stimuli based not only on intentions of the observer and physical salience but also on recent selection history. For example, RTs for targets decrease when a target feature is identical to a preceding trial. This intertrial priming effect was originally found for pop-out targets that are defined by a unique feature that clearly separates them from all visual background and termed Keywords

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Section: Mechanisms Of Distractor-intertrial Primingsupporting

confidence: 57%

Intertrial priming due to distractor repetition is eliminated in homogeneous contexts

Feldmann-Wüstefeld

Schubö

2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…According to the relational account, the failure to obtain more evidence for the orange channel in this and other experiments is due to the fact that there is a strong preference in the visual system to bias visual selection to the relative color of the target instead of its physical color (e.g., Becker, 2010a; Becker et al, 2013, 2014; Harris et al, 2013). With this, the relational account seems to provide a better explanation for present and past results, because it avoids the need to constantly re-define the number of channels and their bandwidth so that they match the results.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 60%

“…This holds because, in the absence of a dedicated orange channel, the red and yellow non-targets would produce higher activations in the red and yellow channels than the orange target, so that the orange target could not be located pre-attentively (e.g., Wolfe, 1994). In contrast to this prediction, it has been shown that an orange item can be successfully located among red and yellow non-targets (e.g., Bauer et al, 1995; Harris et al, 2013; Becker et al, 2014). In fact, Becker et al (2013) showed that a briefly presented orange cue among two red and two yellow other cues can involuntarily capture attention, showing that orange is pre-attentively localizable among red and yellow.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Color priming in pop-out search depends on the relative color of the target

Becker¹,

Valuch²,

Ansorge³

2014

Front. Psychol.

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In visual search for pop-out targets, search times are shorter when the target and non-target colors from the previous trial are repeated than when they change. This priming effect was originally attributed to a feature weighting mechanism that biases attention toward the target features, and away from the non-target features. However, more recent studies have shown that visual selection is strongly context-dependent: according to a relational account of feature priming, the target color is always encoded relative to the non-target color (e.g., as redder or greener). The present study provides a critical test of this hypothesis, by varying the colors of the search items such that either the relative color or the absolute color of the target always remained constant (or both). The results clearly show that color priming depends on the relative color of a target with respect to the non-targets but not on its absolute color value. Moreover, the observed priming effects did not change over the course of the experiment, suggesting that the visual system encodes colors in a relative manner from the start of the experiment. Taken together, these results strongly support a relational account of feature priming in visual search, and are inconsistent with the dominant feature-based views.

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“…Indeed, studies testing the relational account against a feature‐specific view confirmed that capture depends on the feature relationships of the target and distractor rather than their absolute feature values (e.g., Becker et al., , ). In one study, the Ludwig and Gilchrist () paradigm was used, but the number of distractor features was increased to test whether attention was indeed biased to the target feature value (Becker, Harris, Venini & Retell, in press). In one block, observers had to make a fast eye movement to an orange target that was embedded among three gold (yellow‐orange) non‐targets.…”

Section: Evidence For the Relational Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why You Cannot Map Attention: A Relational Theory of Attention and Eye Movements

Becker

2013

Australian Psychologist

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How do we select relevant information from cluttered visual environments? Current theories of attention and eye movement control have proposed a framework of feature detectors that allows us to attend to potentially important information and ignore irrelevant information. Each feature detector supposedly signals the existence of a single elementary feature (e.g., red) in the environment and can be modulated by the intention to search for particular features. In contrast to these feature detector accounts, recent visual search studies show that features are encoded relative to other features in the surround, in a context‐dependent manner. Attention and eye movements are attracted to items with appropriate relative features (e.g., redder/larger/darker), regardless of their feature value. These findings question the feature detector concept and argue for a relational account of attention and eye movements.

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Visual search for color and shape: When is the gaze guided by feature relationships, when by feature values?

Cited by 55 publications

References 106 publications

Intertrial priming due to distractor repetition is eliminated in homogeneous contexts

Intertrial priming due to distractor repetition is eliminated in homogeneous contexts

Color priming in pop-out search depends on the relative color of the target

Why You Cannot Map Attention: A Relational Theory of Attention and Eye Movements

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