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Revisiting the time course of inter-trial feature priming in singleton search

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Abstract

Current theories of the locus of inter-trial priming effects in efficient visual search posit an early perceptual component that reflects the short-term influence of a memory trace for low-level stimulus attributes. Despite the fact that this memory trace is hypothesized to be short term, and should therefore have a diminishing influence on performance over time, there has been relatively little study of the effect of time alone on singleton priming effects. The present series of experiments addresses this issue by systematically examining the effect of time on the priming of pop-out (PoP) effect. In Experiment 1, we show that the PoP effect does indeed diminish with increases in the RSI between trials, and does so in accord with a power-law function. In Experiment 2, we show that temporal discriminability of trial n − 1 from the trial that precedes it does not contribute to PoP effects. The results of Experiment 3 revealed two key results: (1) the PoP effect survives an equivalent number of intervening trials across very different RSI conditions; and (2) the cumulative target repetition benefit does depend on the RSI between trials. Together, the results favor neither a simple passive decay nor a strong episodic retrieval account of the PoP effect.

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Notes

  1. The slower RTs overall at the 500 and 16,000 RSI conditions likely owe to lack of preparation on the part of the observers either because there is insufficient preparatory time (i.e. the 500 ms RSI condition) or because participants become distracted at particularly long RSIs (i.e. the 16,000 ms RSI condition), despite the fact that the fixation cross signaled an upcoming search trial 500 ms prior to its presentation. Although it might be argued that the especially large PoP effects that accompany slower responding at the shortest RSI may in some way produce the profound influence of RSI on PoP at these shorter RSIs, mean RTs are also slower at the longest RSI; the condition with the smallest PoP effect.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant awarded to B.M. In addition we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Maria C. D’Angelo.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. West, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    David R. Thomson & Bruce Milliken

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  1. David R. Thomson
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  2. Bruce Milliken
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Correspondence to David R. Thomson.

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Thomson, D.R., Milliken, B. Revisiting the time course of inter-trial feature priming in singleton search. Psychological Research 77, 637–650 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0455-7

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