Target-nontarget similarity decreases search efficiency and increases stimulus-driven control in visual search
DOI: 10.3758/s13414-017-1367-9
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study investigates the mechanisms of attentional control in visual search, specifically testing the "attentional window account" proposed by Theeuwes. This account posits that saliency computations are confined to an attentional window whose size depends on search efficiency: efficient (parallel) search involves a large window, increasing the likelihood of attentional capture by salient distractors, while inefficient (serial) search involves a small window, reducing such capture. The authors aimed to determine whether this hypothesis holds when search efficiency is manipulated via target–nontarget similarity rather than set size, which can introduce confounding variables like element density. The experiment employed the additional singleton paradigm, where participants searched for a shape singleton (a square) among nontargets while ignoring a potentially salient color singleton distractor. Search efficiency was manipulated by varying the similarity between the target and nontarget shapes: low similarity (circles as nontargets) induced efficient search, while high similarity (diamonds as nontargets) induced inefficient search. Set size varied between five and nine items. Two groups of participants were tested: one with randomly interleaved conditions and another with blocked conditions to control for pretrial expectations. Reaction times (RTs) were measured to assess search slopes and the interference caused by the color distractor. The results demonstrated that the manipulation successfully induced efficient search slopes (5.9 ms/item) in the low-similarity condition and inefficient slopes (16.4 ms/item) in the high-similarity condition. Contrary to the predictions of the attentional window account, interference from the salient color distractor was significantly larger during inefficient search (67 ms increase in RT) than during efficient search (43 ms increase). This pattern held true regardless of whether conditions were blocked or random, indicating that pretrial adjustments of the attentional window did not drive the effect. The findings suggest that when the target is less salient due to high similarity with nontargets, the relative saliency of the distractor increases, leading to stronger attentional capture. These findings contradict the attentional window account, which predicts reduced capture during inefficient search due to a narrowed attentional window. Instead, the results align with classic saliency-map models, which propose that attention is drawn to the most salient element in the display. The study concludes that bottom-up, stimulus-driven control is stronger when search is difficult and the target is inconspicuous, supporting the view that relative target saliency, rather than the size of an attentional window, determines the magnitude of attentional capture. This clarifies the conditions under which bottom-up processing dominates, highlighting a discrepancy between the attentional window hypothesis and established computational models of visual attention.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | pdftotext | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| enrich | failed | — | — | — | 5 | 2026-07-05 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-26 |
| verify | partial | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified_with_issues.
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