Bottom-up priming of top-down attentional control settings

Abstract

Previous research suggests that the efficiency of visual search can be influenced by the implicit priming of top-down control mechanisms produced by intertrial repetition of display characteristics. The present studies were designed to explore the potential influence of intertrial priming on top-down control settings known to modulate the capture of spatial attention. In Experiment 1, subjects responded to unpredictably red or green colour-singleton targets preceded by uninformative red or green colour-singleton cues. Significant cueing effects indicative of attentional capture were obtained for all combinations of cue colour and target colour. More importantly, the magnitude of cueing effects varied as a function of the congruence between the cue colour and the colour of the target on the previous trial. In Experiment 2, when subjects were encouraged to adopt an attention set for a specific colour, only cues of the same colour produced evidence of attentional capture, and the intertrial congruence between cue and previous target colour had no effect on performance. It is concluded that top-down attentional control settings are subject to bottom-up, intertrial priming, but only when primed parameters of the control settings are left unspecified by the nature of the task.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant no. BCS-9817673 to CLF. Portions of this research were presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Toronto, November 12, 2005.