Simple actions influence pop-out search

ABSTRACT

Recent research has revealed that a simple action (pressing a computer key) produced in response to a visual object prioritizes features of that object in subsequent visual search. The effects of simple action, however, have only been studied with search displays that required serial search. Here we explored whether simple actions have an effect when the target in visual search is always a salient singleton. Participants viewed a coloured shape at the beginning of each trial, and sometimes they acted (pressed the space bar) in response to it. In the subsequent search task, after acting (but not after viewing), the previously-seen colour affected search performance even though the target was always a salient singleton and the colour was uninformative. The results reveal that prior action can interact with bottom-up salience during search. Implications for our understanding of both visual search and repetition priming are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Action effect
• visual search
• repetition priming
• action and perception

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In order for the prime colour to be uninformative, it was necessary in this experiment to have fewer valid trials than invalid trials. As a result, we had only 30 trials in two cells of the design, similar to what others have used (e.g., Symes et al., 2008). The experiment reported in Appendix also had 30 trials per cell. A power analysis revealed that the Experiments had post hoc powers of .67 and .99, respectively.