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Long-lasting sensitization to a given colour after visual search

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Abstract

Visual attention enables an observer to select specific visual information for processing. In an ambiguous motion task in which a coloured grating can be perceived as moving in either of two opposite directions depending on the relative salience of two colours in the display, attending to one of the colours influences the direction in which the grating appears to move1. Here, we use this secondary effect of attention in a motion task to measure the effect of attending to a specific colour in a search task. Observers performed a search task in which they searched for a target letter in a 4 × 4 coloured matrix. Each of the 16 squares within a matrix was assigned one of four colours, and observers knew that the target letter would appear on only one of these colours throughout the experiment. Observers performed the ambiguous motion task before and after the search task. Attending to a particular colour for a brief period in the search task profoundly influenced the perceived direction of motion. This effect lasted for up to one month and in some cases had to be reversed by practising searches for the complementary colour, indicating a much longer-persisting effect of attention than has been observed previously.

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Figure 1: The visual search task and the third-order motion paradigm.
Figure 2: Results.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by AFOSR, Life Science Directorate, Visual Information Processing Program.

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Author notes

  1. Chia-huei Tseng

    Present address: Center of Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08854, USA

  2. Joetta L. Gobell

    Present address: Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, 10003, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, California, 92697, USA

    Chia-huei Tseng, Joetta L. Gobell & George Sperling

  2. Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, and Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine, California, 92697, USA

    George Sperling

Authors
  1. Chia-huei Tseng
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  2. Joetta L. Gobell
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Correspondence to Chia-huei Tseng or George Sperling.

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The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.

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Tseng, Ch., Gobell, J. & Sperling, G. Long-lasting sensitization to a given colour after visual search. Nature 428, 657–660 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02443

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