title: Automatic attraction of visual attention by supraletter features of former target strings.
abstract: Observers were trained to search for a particular horizontal string of three capital letters presented among similar strings consisting of exactly the same letters in different orders. The training was followed by a test in which the observers searched for a new target that was identical to one of the former distractors. The new distractor set consisted of the remaining former distractors plus the former target. On each trial, three letter strings were displayed, which included the target string with a probability of 0.5. In Experiment 1, the strings were centered at different locations on the circumference of an imaginary circle around the fixation point. The training phase of Experiment 2 was similar, but in the test phase of the experiment, the strings were located in a vertical array centered on fixation, and in target-present arrays, the target always appeared at fixation. In both experiments, performance (d') degraded on trials in which former targets were present, suggesting that the former targets automatically drew processing resources away from the current targets. Apparently, the two experiments showed automatic attraction of visual attention by supraletter features of former target strings.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Center for Visual Cognition, University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors.forename: Søren
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kyllingsbæk
authors.affiliation: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - University of Leuven Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Sven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Van Lommel
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark.
authors.forename: Thomas A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Sørensen
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Center for Visual Cognition, University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors.forename: Claus
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bundesen
keywords: attention; capture; letters; visual perception; visual search