title: Can a single short-term mechanism account for priming of pop-out?
abstract: Trial-to-trial feature repetition speeds response times in pop-out visual search tasks. These priming effects are often ascribed to a short-term memory system. Recently, however, it has been reported that a 'build-up' sequence of repetitions could facilitate responses over 16 trials later - well beyond twice the typically reported time course (Vision Research, 2011, 51, 1972-1978). Here, we first report two replication attempts that yielded little to no support for such long-term priming of pop-out. The results instead fell in line with the predictions of a previously proposed computational model that describes priming as short-lived facilitation that decays over approximately eight trials (Vision Research, 2010, 50, 2110-2115). In the second part of this study, we show that these data are consistent with a simple formulation of decay with a single timescale, and that there is no significant priming beyond eight trials.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Education, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Electronic address: w.kruijne@vu.nl.
authors.forename: Wouter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Kruijne
authors.affiliation: Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jan W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Brascamp
authors.affiliation: Psychology, University of Iceland, Gimli, Sæmundargata, IS-101 Reykjavík, Iceland.
authors.forename: Árni
authors.initials: Á
authors.lastname: Kristjánsson
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Education, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Martijn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meeter
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D060865:Repetition Priming; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Implicit memory; Kernel analysis; Priming of pop-out; Visual search