title: Mechanisms of priming of pop-out: Stored representations or feature-gain modulations?
abstract: Previous research has shown that repetition of a task-relevant attention-capturing feature facilitates pop-out search. This priming of pop-out effect is due to some residual memory from recent trials. We explore two possible mechanisms of priming of pop-out: a top-down attentional benefit from a memory of the previous target representation that is stored in visual short-term memory (VSTM) and a bottom-up change of attentional gains from perceptual features of the previously attended target. We manipulated participants' ability to form a memory trace in VSTM by occupying it with a distractor task and found that occupying VSTM did not interfere with priming of pop-out. We next manipulated attentional gains associated with feature values by inserting an irrelevant task between pop-out searches. We found that the color of the target from the intervening perceptual task influenced pop-out search: The current pop-out search was facilitated when the intervening task's target matched the target color of the pop-out search. These results suggest that priming of pop-out might not be due to a memory trace of the previous targets in VSTM but, rather, might be due to changes in attentional control based on priming from relatively low-level feature representations of previously attended objects.
authors.affiliation: University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1407, USA.
authors.forename: Hyunkyu
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Michael C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Mozer
authors.forename: Shaun P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Vecera
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time