Priming effect of individual similarity and ensemble perception in visual search and working memory

Perceptual priming is a well-known phenomenon showing that the repetition of an object’s feature can facilitate subsequent detection of that item. Although the priming effect has been rigorously studied in visual search, less is known about its effect on working memory and it is unclear whether the repetition of similar features, and furthermore, ensemble perception created by a large set of similar features, can induce priming. In this study, we investigated the priming effects of individual similarity and ensemble perception in visual search and visual working memory (VWM). We replicated the classic perceptual priming effect (Experiment 1a) and found that visual search was enhanced when the current target had a similar color to the previous target (Experiment 1b), but not when the similar color had been shown as a distractor before (Experiment 1c). However, if the target and distractors of similar colors formed ensemble perception, the search efficiency was again promoted even when the current target shared the same color with the previous distractor (Experiment 1d). For VWM, repeating the ensembles of the target- and nontarget-color subsets did not significantly affect the memory capacity, while switching the two harmed the memory fidelity but not capacity (Experiment 2). We suggest different underlying mechanisms for priming in visual search and VWM: in the former, the perception history of individual similarity and stimuli ensemble exert their effects on through the priority map, by forming a gradient distribution of attentional weights that peak at the previous target feature and diminish as stimulus diverges from the previously selected one; while in the latter, perception history of memory ensemble may influence the deployment of existing memory resources across trials, thereby affecting the memory fidelity but not its capacity.