Visual consciousness and intertrial feature priming

2016

Haggit, Jordan M., Ph.D., Human Factors and Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Wright State University, 2016. A Computational Model of the Temporal Processing Characteristics of Visual Priming in Search. When people look through the environment their eyes are guided in part by what they have recently seen. This phenomenon, referred to as visual priming, is studied in the laboratory through manipulations of stimulus repetition. Typically, in search tasks, response times are speeded when the same target is repeated relative to when it is changed (e.g., Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994). Although priming is thought to be based on a memory mechanism in the visual system, there is a debate in the literature as to whether such a mechanism is driven by relatively early (e.g., feature-based accounts) or later (e.g., episodic memory accounts) processing. Across three experiments, this dissertation utilized a computational modeling framework (Systems Factorial Technology; Townsend & Nozawa, 1995...

Journal of Experimental Psychology-general, 2004

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2008

The authors report a newly identified intertrial priming phenomenon, within-dimension singleton priming, by which search for a target that happens to be a singleton on the current trial is faster when the target on the previous trial had also been a singleton on the same dimension rather than a nonsingleton. This effect was replicated in 6 experiments with different procedures, with singletons on various dimensions, when the featural contrast defining the singleton remained the same or changed within a dimension from one trial to the next, and when the target was a singleton on a target-defining dimension or on an irrelevant dimension. These findings cannot be explained by previously demonstrated intertrial repetition effects such as dimension-specific priming or priming of popout. Theoretical implications of the within-dimension singleton priming phenomenon are discussed relative to the dimension-weighting hypothesis, the role of stimulus-driven salience in feature-guided search, and the roles of intertrial priming and goal-directed factors in visual search.

Journal of Memory and Language, 1989

Psychological Science, 2002

The cognitive processes at work in masked priming experiments are usually considered automatic and independent of attention. We provide evidence against this view. Three behavioral experiments demonstrate that the occurrence of unconscious priming in a number-comparison task is determined by the allocation of temporal attention to the time window during which the prime-target pair is presented. Both response-congruity priming and physical repetition priming vanish when temporal attention is focused away from this time window. These findings are inconsistent with the concept of a purely automatic spreading of activation during masked priming.

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

In visual search tasks, responses to targets on one trial can influence responses on the next trial. Most typically, target repetition speeds response while switching to a different target slows response. Such "priming" effects have sometimes been given very significant roles in theories of search (e.g., Theeuwes, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 368, 1628, 2013). Most work on priming has involved "singleton" or "popout" tasks. In non-popout priming tasks, observers must often perform a task-switching operation because the guiding template for one target (e.g., a red vertical target in a conjunction task) is incompatible with efficient search for the other target (green horizontal, in this example). We examined priming in inefficient search where the priming feature (Color: Experiments 1-3, Shape: Experiments 4-5) was irrelevant to the task of finding a T among Ls. We wished to determine if finding a red T on one trial helped observers to be more efficient if the next T was also red. In all experiments, we found additive priming effects. The reaction time (RT) for the second trial was shorter if the color of the T was repeated. However, there was no interaction with set size. The slope of the RT × Set Size function was not shallower for runs of the same target color, compared to trials where the target color switched. We propose that priming might produce transient guidance of the earliest deployments of attention on the next trial or it might speed decisions about a selected target. Priming does not appear to guide attention over the entire search.

automatic processes, unconscious visual processing, attentional control, semantic priming, visuo-motor priming, subliminal perception, consciousness classical theories of automaticity assume that automatic processes elicited by unconscious stimuli are autonomous and independent of higher-level cognitive influences. in contrast to these classical conceptions, we argue that automatic processing depends on attentional amplification of task-congruent processing pathways and propose an attentional sensitization model of unconscious visual processing: According to this model, unconscious visual processing is automatic in the sense that it is initiated without deliberate intention. however, unconscious visual processing is susceptible to attentional top-down control and is only elicited if the cognitive system is configured accordingly. in this article, we describe our attentional sensitization model and review recent evidence demonstrating attentional influences on subliminal priming, a prototypical example of an automatic process. we show that subliminal priming (a) depends on attentional resources, (b) is susceptible to stimulus expectations, (c) is influenced by action intentions, and (d) is modulated by task sets. these data suggest that attention enhances or attenuates unconscious visual processes in congruency with attentional task representations similar to conscious perception. we argue that seemingly paradoxical, hitherto unexplained findings regarding the automaticity of the underlying processes in many cognitive domains can be easily accommodated by our attentional sensitization model. we conclude this review with a discussion of future research questions regarding the nature of attentional control of unconscious visual processing.

Journal of Vision, 2012

In visual search, context information can serve as a cue to guide attention to the target location. When observers repeatedly encounter displays with identical target-distractor arrangements, reaction times (RTs) are faster for repeated relative to nonrepeated displays, the latter containing novel configurations. This effect has been termed ''contextual cueing.'' The present study asked whether information about the target location in repeated displays is ''explicit'' (or ''conscious'') in nature. To examine this issue, observers performed a test session (after an initial training phase in which RTs to repeated and nonrepeated displays were measured) in which the search stimuli were presented briefly and terminated by visual masks; following this, observers had to make a target localization response (with accuracy as the dependent measure) and indicate their visual experience and confidence associated with the localization response. The data were examined at the level of individual displays, i.e., in terms of whether or not a repeated display actually produced contextual cueing. The results were that (a) contextual cueing was driven by only a very small number of about four actually learned configurations; (b) localization accuracy was increased for learned relative to nonrepeated displays; and (c) both consciousness measures were enhanced for learned compared to nonrepeated displays. It is concluded that contextual cueing is driven by only a few repeated displays and the ability to locate the target in these displays is associated with increased visual experience.

The First Half Second, 2006

When a mask follows a briefly presented target there are several consequences. The one that has historically received the most attention is a reduction in the visibility of the target. This is the conventional definition of masking. Yet, another equally important consequence is that errors in target identification are biased toward the identity of the mask rather than being randomly distributed among the target alternatives. This is evidence of object substitution. Finally, when the target is a signal to make a speeded action, this action can be influenced by a prime stimulus that is not even visible to the participant. This is known as masked response priming. In this chapter we review evidence concerning all three of these consequences of viewing rapid visual sequences. We argue that these consequences are difficult to understand, either individually or together, as the consequence of strictly feed-forward processing in the visual brain. In contrast, when these results are considered from the perspective of reentrant visual circuitry, they are easier to understand and to relate to one another. Moreover, predictions derived from a reentrant view of the brain lead to unexpected and novel results that are confirmed when tested against psychophysical data. A reentrant view of visual masking-3 Most theories of vision hold to the view that from the time the eye first encounters a scene to the time that conscious perception occurs the scene has been coded at several levels in the visual system. Moreover, most theories propose some form of interaction between the anatomically lower levels of processing involved in registering details of the scene (e.g., retina, lateral geniculate nucleus, area V1) and the anatomically higher levels involved in the meaningful categorization and conscious experience of the scene (e.g., extra-striate cortical regions including the temporal cortex). Some theorists have even referred to this as the distinction between "seeing" and "understanding," or between stimulus-driven and conceptually-driven processing (

Vision Research, 2009

In a visual search task, a salient distractor often elongates response times (RTs) even when it is task-irrelevant. These distraction costs are larger when the irrelevant distractor is similar than when dissimilar to the target. In the present study, we tested whether this similarity effect is mostly due to more frequent oculomotor capture by target-similar versus target-dissimilar distractors (contingent capture hypothesis), or to elongated dwell times on target-similar versus dissimilar distractors (attentional disengagement hypothesis), by measuring the eye movements of the observers during visual search. The results showed that similar distractors were both selected more frequently, and produced longer dwell times than dissimilar distractors. However, attentional capture contributed more to the similarity effect than disengagement. The results of a second experiment showed that stronger capture by similar than dissimilar distractors in part reflected intertrial priming effects: distractors which had the same colour as the target on the previous trial were selected more frequently than distractors with a different colour. These priming effects were however too small to account fully for the similarity effect. More importantly, the results indicated that allegedly stimulus-driven intertrial priming effects and allegedly top-down controlled similarity effects may be mediated by the same underlying mechanism.