Visual search for featural singletons: No top-down modulation, only bottom-up priming

Theeuwes, Jan; Reimann, Brit; Mortier, Karen · 2006 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1080/13506280500195110

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Summary

This study investigates whether top-down knowledge (expectancy-based attentional control) can guide visual search for featural singletons, or if such search is driven exclusively by bottom-up priming. While theories like Guided Search and dimensional weighting suggest that observers can allocate attentional weight to specific feature dimensions to speed up detection, the authors argue that previous evidence may conflate top-down guidance with passive intertrial priming. The research aims to disentangle these mechanisms by manipulating response requirements and cue validity to determine if expectancy can modulate the early perceptual selection of a "pop-out" target. The authors conducted five experiments using singleton detection tasks where participants searched for a unique item (e.g., a red circle among green circles) defined by color or shape. In Experiment 1, participants responded to the presence of a singleton after receiving a verbal cue indicating the likely dimension (83% validity). This resulted in significant cueing benefits and costs. However, in Experiments 2 and 3, the search task remained identical, but participants responded to a secondary feature (line orientation or letter) within the singleton rather than its presence. Under these conditions, which separate perceptual selection from response selection, the verbal cues had no effect on reaction times, despite participants demonstrating they processed the cues. Experiment 4 replaced verbal cues with symbolic cues (the actual singleton stimulus) and returned to a presence-detection task, yielding cueing effects. Experiment 5 manipulated cue validity to be low (16.6%) to further test the nature of these effects. The results indicate that advance knowledge of the target dimension does not facilitate the perceptual search for a featural singleton. The cueing effects observed in Experiment 1 and Experiment 4 are attributed to response selection processes or passive bottom-up priming rather than top-down modulation of early visual selection. Specifically, the lack of cueing effects in Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrates that when response bias is removed, expectancy cannot speed up the detection of the singleton. Furthermore, the interaction between cue validity and intertrial switches in Experiment 4 suggests that facilitation occurs only when the current target matches the previous trial’s target, consistent with passive priming. The authors conclude that expectancy-based top-down knowledge cannot guide the search for a featural singleton; instead, any observed facilitation is due to bottom-up priming effects that are cognitively inaccessible and cannot be overridden by top-down control. This challenges prevailing models that assume top-down weighting of feature dimensions in singleton search.

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• visual search