Colour-cueing in visual search.
Several studies have shown that people can selectively attend to stimulus colour, e.g., in visual search, and that preknowledge of a target colour can improve response speed/accuracy. The purpose was to use a form-identification task to determine whether valid colour precues can produce benefits and invalid cues costs. The subject had to identify the orientation of a "T"-shaped element in a ring of randomly-oriented "L"s when either two or four of the elements were differently coloured. Contrary to Moore and Egeth's (1998) recent findings, colour-based attention did affect performance under data-limited conditions: Colour cues produced benefits when processing load was high; when the load was reduced, they incurred only costs. Surprisingly, a valid colour cue succeeded in improving performance in the high-load condition even when its validity was reduced to the chance level. Overall, the results suggest that knowledge of a target colour does not facilitate the processing of the target, but makes it possible to prioritize it.
Department of Psychology, Universirty of Helsinki, Finland. laarni@hkkk.fi
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D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D003118:Color Perception; D003463:Cues; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological