Changing your mind: on the contributions of top-down and bottom-up guidance in visual search for feature singletons

Observers, searching for targets among distractor items, guide attention with a mix of top-down information--based on observers' knowledge--and bottom-up information--stimulus-based and largely independent of that knowledge. There are 2 types of top-down guidance: explicit information (e.g., verbal description) and implicit priming by preceding targets (top-down because it implies knowledge of previous searches). Experiments 1 and 2 separate bottom-up and top-down contributions to singleton search. Experiment 3 shows that priming effects are based more strongly on target than on distractor identity. Experiments 4 and 5 show that more difficult search for one type of target (color) can impair search for other types (size, orientation). Experiment 6 shows that priming guides attention and does not just modulate response.