Color singleton pop-out does not always poop out: an alternative to visual search

Folk psychology suggests that when an observer views a scene, a unique item will stand out and draw attention to itself. This belief stands in contrast to numerous studies in visual search that have found that a unique target item (e.g., a unique color) is not identified more quickly than a nonunique target. We hypothesized that this finding is the result of task demands of visual search, and that when the task does not involve visual search, uniqueness will pop out. We tested this hypothesis in a task in which observers were presented an array of letters and asked to respond aloud, as quickly as possible, with the identity of any one of the letters. The observers were significantly more likely to respond with a uniquely colored letter than would be expected by chance. In a task in which observers blurt out the first thing that they see, unique pop-out does not poop out.