title: Flexible cue combination in the guidance of attention in visual search.
abstract: Hodsoll and Humphreys (2001) have assessed the relative contributions of stimulus-driven and user-driven knowledge on linearly- and nonlinearly separable searches. However, the target feature used to determine linear separability in their task (i.e., target size) was required to locate the target. In the present work, we investigated the contributions of stimulus-driven and user-driven knowledge when a linearly- or a nonlinearly-separable feature is available but not required for target identification. We asked observers to complete a series of standard color×orientation conjunction searches in which target size was either linearly- or nonlinearly separable from the size of the distractors. When guidance by color×orientation and guidance by size information are both available, observers rely on whichever information results in the best search efficiency. This is the case irrespective of whether we provide target foreknowledge by blocking stimulus conditions, suggesting that feature information is used in both a stimulus-driven and a user-driven fashion.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada. Electronic address: jo_bra@live.concordia.ca.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Brand
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Regina, Canada.
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Oriet
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Canada.
authors.forename: Aaron P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.affiliation: Visual Attention Lab, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, United States.
authors.forename: Jeremy M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Wolfe
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012858:Size Perception / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Linear separability; Relational guidance hypothesis; Visual search