Is attention really biased toward the last target location in visual search? Attention, response rules, distractors, and eye movements

Hilchey, Matthew D.; Antinucci, Victoria; Lamy, Dominique; Pratt, Jay · 2019 · Crossref

DOI: 10.3758/s13423-019-01569-x

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Summary

This study investigates a longstanding discrepancy in visual search literature regarding whether attention is biased toward or away from previously attended target locations. While visual search studies typically report facilitation for repeated target locations, target–target cueing studies report inhibition. The authors hypothesize that this conflict arises from three methodological differences: stimulus–response translation rules (identification vs. localization), the perceptual processing demands required to identify the target, and the presence of distractors. To resolve this, the researchers conducted three experiments using eye-tracking to measure saccadic response times (SRTs) as a pure measure of attentional deployment, independent of manual response biases. Experiment 1 employed a visual search paradigm requiring participants to make an eye movement to a target and then identify its shape via keypress. Results showed that SRTs were consistently faster when the target location changed diagonally (greatest distance) and slower when the location or hemifield repeated, indicating an intrinsic bias of attention away from the previous target location. However, manual keypress responses showed facilitation for repeated locations only when the specific keypress response also repeated, supporting episodic-retrieval theories where response-location associations drive manual speed. Experiment 2 removed the shape identification requirement to test if focal attentional demands influenced the bias. The removal of this perceptual load did not alter the SRT pattern; attention remained biased away from the repeated location, ruling out focal attention as the cause of the discrepancy. Experiment 3 removed distractors from the display to isolate the effect of prior target location inhibition from potential interference caused by prior distractor locations. In the absence of distractors, the inhibition at the repeated target location became significantly more pronounced, with SRTs being especially slow when the target location repeated compared to all other transitions. This confirmed that distractor processing in previous studies likely masked the full extent of the inhibition at the prior target site. Collectively, the findings demonstrate that shifts of attention intrinsically tend away from prior target locations, consistent with inhibited spatial-reorienting theories. The apparent facilitation found in traditional visual search studies is attributed to post-attentional processes, specifically stimulus–response translation rules and episodic retrieval of response codes, rather than attentional deployment. The study concludes that the discrepancy between literatures is driven by differences in response rules and distractor presence, not by fundamental differences in how attention is deployed.

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Topics

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• visual search
• inattentional change blindness