Inter-trial and redundant-signals effects in visual search and discrimination tasks: separable pre-attentive and post-selective effects.
Feature singleton search is faster when the target-defining dimension is repeated, rather than changed, across trials (Found & Müller, 1996). A similar dimension repetition benefit has been observed in a non-search (discrimination) task with a single stimulus (Mortier, Theeuwes, & Starreveld, 2005). Two experiments examined whether these effects in the two tasks originate from the same or different processing stages. Experiment 1 revealed differential feature-specific effects, and Experiment 2 differential processing of dimensionally redundant target signals between the two types of task. These dissociations support the existence of separable, pre-attentive and post-selective sources of inter-trial effects in the two tasks.
Krummenacher
Joseph
J
Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. joseph.krummenacher@unifr.ch
Grubert
Anna
A
Müller
Hermann J
HJ
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult