Abstract
Rauschenberger and Yantis (2006) observed that an intersecting circle-line combination enjoyed significantly greater search efficiency when it was oriented to resemble a “Q” than when it was oriented so that the intersecting line was vertical (cf. Treisman & Souther, 1985). Although a control experiment made it unlikely that the obliqueness of the line was responsible for the observed benefit, there was no direct evidence that this benefit was attributable to the “Q-ness” of the stimulus. In the present study, a subset of Rauschenberger and Yantis’s experiments was repeated with Chinese subjects, who had never been exposed to the Latin alphabet. For these subjects, there was no benefit for the “Q”-like stimulus, in contrast to the results of Rauschenberger and Yantis’s study. These results show that a simple 45° rotation of a stimulus can affect search efficiency significantly—but only when this rotation bestows meaning, or familiarity, to that stimulus.
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This research was supported by NSF Grant 0418179 to R.R. We express our gratitude to the subjects in our experiments, who took time out of their busy lives during the particularly demanding harvesting season to help us out with our study
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Rauschenberger, R., Chu, H. The effects of stimulus rotation and familiarity in visual search. Perception & Psychophysics 68, 770–775 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193700
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193700