Moray Revisited: High-Priority Affective Stimuli and Visual Search

Harris, Christine R.; Pashler, Harold; Coburn, Pashler · 2003 · The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A

DOI: 10.1080/02724980343000107

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Summary

This study investigates whether "high-priority" affective stimuli, specifically an individual’s own name and emotionally charged words, automatically capture attention or allow for capacity-free parallel visual search. The research was motivated by conflicting literature, particularly Moray’s (1959) finding that unattended names are detected and claims by Mack and Rock (1998) that names "pop out" of visual displays. The authors aimed to clarify if these stimuli bypass standard attentional capacity limitations, which has implications for theories of selective attention and semantic processing of unattended information. The researchers conducted nine experiments using visual search tasks with word displays. In speeded search tasks (Experiments 1–7), participants searched for targets (own name, control name, emotional word, or neutral word) among distractors, with display set sizes varying from 2 to 12 words. Reaction times (RTs) and error rates were measured to determine search slopes, where flat slopes indicate parallel processing. Experiments 8 and 9 utilized tachistoscopic presentations to compare accuracy in simultaneous versus successive displays, assessing capacity limitations directly. The design systematically varied the role of high-priority stimuli as either targets or distractors to test for attentional capture and detection efficiency. The results consistently contradicted the hypothesis that high-priority stimuli enable parallel search. In speeded tasks, subjects detected their own names faster than control names, but search slopes remained significantly positive (e.g., 35.4 ms/item for own names vs. 47.0 ms/item for controls in Experiment 1), indicating serial, capacity-limited processing rather than "pop-out." Similarly, emotionally charged words showed no advantage in detection speed or accuracy over neutral words. When high-priority stimuli served as distractors, they did not impair performance more than neutral distractors, suggesting they do not involuntarily capture attention. Furthermore, accuracy comparisons in simultaneous versus successive displays confirmed that search for names and emotional words is subject to the same severe capacity limitations as neutral words. The study concludes that high-priority affective stimuli do not automatically grab attention or bypass capacity constraints in visual search. While own names are detected more quickly than other names, this advantage does not reflect parallel processing or automatic attentional capture. These findings challenge late-selection theories that rely on the special status of high-priority stimuli to argue for unselective semantic analysis. Instead, the results suggest that even stimuli with strong motivational significance are processed within the same limited-capacity mechanisms as neutral stimuli, implying that top-down factors and task demands play a critical role in attentional selection.

Key finding

High-priority affective stimuli like one's own name or emotional words do not facilitate parallel visual search or escape capacity limitations, behaving similarly to neutral stimuli in terms of search slopes and detection efficiency.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 270

Provenance

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Topics

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• visual search