Abstract
Theeuwes (1992) found a distracting effect of irrelevant-dimension singletons in a task involving search for a known target. He argued from this that selectivity is determined solely by stimulus salience; the parallel stage of visual processing cannot provide top-down guidance to the attentive stage sufficient to permit completely selective use of task-relevant information. We argue that in the task used by Theeuwes, subjects may have adopted the strategy of searching for an odd form even though the specific target form was known. In Experiment 1, we replicated Theeuwes’s findings. Search for a circle target among diamond nontargets was disrupted by the presence of a diamond nontarget that was uniquely colored. In two subsequent experiments, we discouraged the singleton detection strategy, forcing subjects to search for the target feature. There was no distracting effect of a color singleton in these experiments, even with displays physically identical to those of Experiment 1, demonstrating that top-down selectivity is indeed possible during visual search. We conclude that goal-directed selection of a specific known featural identity may override stimulus-driven capture by salient featural singletons.
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This research was supported by Grant DBS 89-19554 from the National Science Foundation and Grant AFOS1MSSA-92-0041 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. We thank Brad Gibson, Anne Hillstrom, and Steven Yantis for helpful discussions concerning this research, and James Johnston, Jan Theeuwes, and Steven Todd for thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper
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Bacon, W.F., Egeth, H.E. Overriding stimulus-driven attentional capture. Perception & Psychophysics 55, 485–496 (1994). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205306
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03205306