The effect of informative and uninformative cueing of attention on feature integration

In the present study, the authors observed the effect of informative and uninformative attentional cueing on visual search for targets that were defined by a simple feature or by conjunctions of features. Three different types of attentional cueing were tested in three experiments: peripheral informative cueing, peripheral uninformative cueing, and central informative cueing. Participants showed a greater effect of cueing in detecting a conjunction of features than in detecting unique features only when attention was oriented by either peripheral or central informative cueing. This differential cueing effect was not observed when attention was oriented by peripheral uninformative cueing. The results suggest that voluntarily oriented attention plays a more important role in feature integration than automatically oriented attention does. The results also pose limits on the generalizability of K. A. Briand's (1998) proposal regarding the role of automatically oriented attention in feature integration.