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You see what you look for: Targets and distractors in visual search can cause opposing serial dependencies.

ABSTRACT: Visual perception is, at any given moment, strongly influenced by its temporal context-what stimuli have recently been perceived and in what surroundings. We have previously shown that to-be-ignored items produce a bias upon subsequent perceptual decisions that acts in parallel with other biases induced by attended items. However, our previous investigations were confined to biases upon the perceived orientation of a visual search target, and it is unclear whether these biases influence perceptual decisions in a more general sense. Here, we test whether the biases from visual search targets and distractors affect the perceived orientation of a neutral test line, one that is neither a target nor a distractor. To do so, we asked participants to search for an oddly oriented line among distractors and report its location for a few trials and next presented a test line irrelevant to the search task. Participants were asked to report the orientation of the test line. Our results indicate that in tasks involving visual search, targets induce a positive bias upon a neutral test line if their orientations are similar, whereas distractors produce an attractive bias for similar test lines and a repulsive bias if the orientations of the test line and the average orientation of the distractors are far apart in feature space. In sum, our results show that both attentional role and proximity in feature space between previous and current stimuli determine the direction of biases in perceptual decisions.

SUBMITTER: Rafiei M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8419872 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Daily classroom activities that require children to perform visual search (VS) tasks are common across all educational levels: from searching for a missing piece of a puzzle in kindergarten to solving equations in college. However, VS tasks are often not performed in isolation, but rather students are maintaining information related to an ongoing task that loads working memory (WM). Unfortunately, it is still unclear how these processes interact and evolve in development. The present work aims to study how a concurrent visual WM (VWM) load can modulate VS performance based on the Developmental Model of Endogenous Mental Attention (Pascual-Leone and Johnson, 1999, 2005, 2021). A sample of kindergarten, elementary (2nd and 4th grades), middle school (6th grade), and college students looked for real-world photorealistic targets while maintaining similar objects in VWM in a dual-task paradigm. VWM load was manipulated using high and low memory load conditions. Additionally, looking for potential modulations related to individual differences, we studied the relationship between IQ, VWM span, and executive functions with VS efficiency. Finally, we also registered reported measures of potential strategies employed during the VS task. The results from a large sample of 147 participants between 5 and 25 years old revealed that even the youngest children could efficiently perform a VS task with a concurrent VWM load, replicating previous results found in adulthood. However, we found a slight increase in false alarms and commission errors when memory was highly loaded for all the participants regardless of age. As expected, we found positive correlations between VS efficiency and IQ and VWM span measures. Interestingly, the proportion of participants who used tracking organization strategies increased with age in all cases. However, although cognitive strategies to remember the target became more complex as age increased, it was only significant under the low VWM load conditions. The results seem relevant to understanding the development of VS based on the Model of Endogenous Mental Attention and the design of training programs to improve attention. The implications in educational contexts are discussed and are especially relevant for students with learning disabilities or attention problems.

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You see what you look for: Targets and distractors in visual search can cause opposing serial dependencies.

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