Longterm visual associations affect attentional guidance

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

When observers perform a visual search task, they are assumed to adopt an attentional set for what they are looking for. The present experiment investigates the influence of long-term visual memory associations on this attentional set. On each trial, observers were asked to search a display for a grayscale version of a known traffic sign. On each trial, a distractor sign was drawn in full color. This color could either be related or unrelated to the target sign. Distractors interfered more with search when their color was related (e.g. red when the target was a stop sign), implying that long-term color associations resulted in inadvertent attentional guidance, even though color was irrelevant to the task. The results add to the growing body of evidence that long-term memory representations automatically affect attentional orienting. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)243-247
JournalActa Psychologica
Volume137
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Longterm visual associations affect attentional guidance'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this