TY - JOUR
T1 - The ignoring paradox
T2 - Cueing distractor features leads first to selection, then to inhibition of to-be-ignored items
AU - Moher, Jeff
AU - Egeth, Howard E.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the following funding sources: NRSA Institutional Training Grant No. T32 EY07143-14 from the Wilmer Eye Institute (J.M.) and ONR Grant No. N000141010278 (H.E.E.). Portions of this work were presented in November of 2010 at the annual Workshop on Object Perception, Attention, and Memory and in May of 2011 at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society. The authors thank Leon Gmeindl, Jaap Munneke, Adriane Seiffert, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on the manuscript.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Observers find a target item more quickly when they have foreknowledge of target-defining attributes, such as identity, color, or location. However, it is less clear whether foreknowledge of nontarget attributes can also speed search. Munneke, Van der Stigchel, and Theeuwes Acta Psychologica 129:101-107, (2008) found that observers found the target more quickly when they were cued to ignore a region of space where a target would not appear. Using a similar paradigm, we explored the effects of cueing nontarget features on search. We found that when we cued observers to ignore nontarget features, search was slowed. The results from a probe-dot detection task revealed that this slowing occurred because, paradoxically, observers initially selected an item appearing in the to-be-ignored color. Finally, we found that cueing nontarget features sped search when placeholders matching the location of the to-be-ignored color preceded presentation of the search display by at least 800 ms; thus, it appears that some limited inhibition of to-be-ignored items occurs following selection. Taken together, these results suggest that observers are unable to explicitly avoid selection of items matching known nontarget features. Instead, when nontarget features are cued, observers select the to-be-ignored feature or the locations of objects matching that feature early in search, and only inhibit them after this selection process.
AB - Observers find a target item more quickly when they have foreknowledge of target-defining attributes, such as identity, color, or location. However, it is less clear whether foreknowledge of nontarget attributes can also speed search. Munneke, Van der Stigchel, and Theeuwes Acta Psychologica 129:101-107, (2008) found that observers found the target more quickly when they were cued to ignore a region of space where a target would not appear. Using a similar paradigm, we explored the effects of cueing nontarget features on search. We found that when we cued observers to ignore nontarget features, search was slowed. The results from a probe-dot detection task revealed that this slowing occurred because, paradoxically, observers initially selected an item appearing in the to-be-ignored color. Finally, we found that cueing nontarget features sped search when placeholders matching the location of the to-be-ignored color preceded presentation of the search display by at least 800 ms; thus, it appears that some limited inhibition of to-be-ignored items occurs following selection. Taken together, these results suggest that observers are unable to explicitly avoid selection of items matching known nontarget features. Instead, when nontarget features are cued, observers select the to-be-ignored feature or the locations of objects matching that feature early in search, and only inhibit them after this selection process.
KW - Attention
KW - Inhibition
KW - Visual search
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U2 - 10.3758/s13414-012-0358-0
DO - 10.3758/s13414-012-0358-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 22893004
AN - SCOPUS:84870770844
SN - 1943-3921
VL - 74
SP - 1590
EP - 1605
JO - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
JF - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
IS - 8
ER -