title: Effects of top-down guidance and singleton priming on visual search.
abstract: Recent literature suggests that observers can use advance knowledge of the target feature to guide their search but fail to do so whenever the target is reliably a singleton. Instead, they engage in singleton-detection mode--that is, they search for the most salient object. In the present study, we aimed to test the notion of a default salience-based search mode. Using several measures, we compared search for a known target when it is always a singleton (fixed-singleton search) relative to when it is incidentally a singleton (multiple-target search). We examined the relative contributions of strategic factors (knowledge that the target is a singleton) and intertrial repetition effects (singleton priming, or the advantage of responding to a singleton target if the target on the previous trial had also been a singleton). In two experiments, singleton priming eliminated all the differences in performance between fixed-singleton and multiple-target search, suggesting that search for a known singleton may be feature based rather than salience based.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. domi@post.tau.ac.il
authors.forename: Dominique
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lamy
authors.forename: Yoav
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bar-Anan
authors.forename: Howard E
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Egeth
authors.forename: Tomer
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Carmel
mesh_terms: D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D011930:Reaction Time; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014796:Visual Perception