title: On the precision of goal-directed attentional selection.
abstract: Attention selects objects in a scene for cognitive processing. A growing body of evidence has been used to argue that observers are able to narrowly restrict attentional selection to stimuli that match a feature-based target template while ignoring similar-looking distractors. For example, visual search for a target among feature-similar nontargets is highly efficient. Here, I demonstrate that observers are substantially impaired at selecting a target among feature-similar nontargets when stimuli are compared with a target template serially in time. The results argue that goal-directed attentional selection is distinctly imprecise, and that comparing stimuli with a target template reflects an inefficient mechanism of selection that cannot fully explain visual search performance under demanding conditions.
authors.affiliation: Johns Hopkins University.
authors.forename: Brian A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Anderson
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
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