Awareness of the continuously visible: information acquisition during preview

What can we learn about a scene while we stare at it, but before we know what we will be looking for? Three experiments were performed to investigate whether previewing a search array prior to knowing the target allows search to operate more quickly (lower reaction time [RT]), more efficiently (reduced set size slope), and/or by consulting abstract mental representations. Experiment 1 compared RTs for previewed and nonpreviewed arrays, some of which were highly degraded with visual noise. Preview reduced RTs for the noisy displays but did not affect search efficiency. Limited interactions of visual quality and preview suggested that prior exposure allowed the extraction and maintenance of about three abstract identities. If the target was one of those items, the observer responded without searching; if not, the observer searched the remaining items as if there had been no preview. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with less extreme noise. In Experiment 3, subjects previewed 0-6 items of a 12-item display. RTs decreased linearly as the number of previewed items increased from 0 to 3 and then reached a plateau, confirming that the capacity of the representation was about 3 items. Implications for visual awareness are discussed.