Abstract
Three experiments examined reaction time (RT) performance in visual pop-out search. Search displays comprised of one color target and two distractors which were presented at 24 possible locations on a circular ellipse. Experiment 1 showed that re-presentation of the target at a previous target location led to expedited RTs, whereas presentation of the target at a distractor location led to slowed RTs (relative to target presentation at a previous empty location). RTs were also faster when the color of the target was the same across consecutive trials, relative to a change of the target’s color. This color priming was independent of the positional priming. Experiment 2 revealed larger positional facilitation, relative to Experiment 1, when position repetitions occurred more likely than chance level; analogously, Experiment 3 revealed stronger color priming effects when target color repetitions were more likely. These position and color manipulations did not change the pattern of color (Experiment 2) and positional priming effects (Experiment 3). While these results support the independency of color and positional priming effects (e.g., Maljkovic and Nakayama in Percept Psychophys 58:977–991, 1996), they also show that these (largely ‘automatic’) effects are top-down modulable when target position and color are predictable (e.g., Müller et al. in Vis Cogn 11:577–602, 2004).
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Notes
This alternative explanation may, in principle, also hold for the pattern of positional priming effects found in Experiments 1–3: positional priming effects may have been reduced in Experiments 1 (baseline) and 3 (predictable target color) relative to Experiment 2 (predictable target position) because, in the latter, the probability of an intervening trial (between the critical trials N − j and N) containing a same-position target was higher than the probability of a different-position target [Experiments 1 and 3: p(same-position) = 0.04, p(different position) = 0.96; Experiment 2: p(same-position) = 0.40, p(different position) = 0.60; values for Experiment 2 collapsed across trials N − 1 through N − 5]. Unfortunately, an analogous analysis to that of color priming effects (with pure sequences of same-color trials) could not be conducted for the position priming effects, because the number of pure position repetition sequences was too low in Experiments 1 and 3 to permit statistical examination. However, previous findings suggest that the relative proportions of same- and different-position trials do not affect the temporal extension of positional priming (Maljkovic and Nakayama 1996). Specifically, Maljkovic and Nakayama (1996; Experiment 2) showed that positional priming extended back 5–8 trials – importantly, independently of whether there were 6 or 12 possible target locations. That is, doubling the probability with which a given target position is repeated did not change the temporal extension of positional priming.
Of course, this does not rule out other accounts of inter-trial priming effects in terms of the retrieval of task-relevant episodic memories attributing repetition benefits at stages following focal attentional selection (i.e., stimulus-response translation; e.g., Logan, 1990, 2002; Neill, 1997; Waszak, Hommel, & Allport, 2003).
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This research was supported by DFG grants FOR480 and EC142 (Excellence Cluster ‘CoTeSys’). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Thomas Geyer, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Department of Psychology, Leopoldstraße 13, 80802 München, Germany (email: geyer@lmu.de).
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Geyer, T., Müller, H.J. Distinct, but top-down modulable color and positional priming mechanisms in visual pop-out search. Psychological Research 73, 167–176 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-008-0207-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-008-0207-x