Competition between color salience and perceptual load during visual selection can be biased by top-down set

Visual salience and perceptual load may both influence the efficiency of visual selection. Recently, Gibson and Bryant (2008) showed that perceptual load can dominate color salience in a distractor interference paradigm. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the possibility that knowledge (of color or load) may modulate the relative operation of these two mechanisms. Consistent with previous findings, perceptual load dominated color salience, but only in certain contexts in which display load was mixed and high-load displays preceded other high-load displays. More important, color salience dominated perceptual load in other contexts in which display load was mixed and low-load displays preceded high-load displays. In addition, color salience also dominated perceptual load in contexts in which display load was fixed and advance knowledge of load was available. Altogether, the present findings suggest that the competition between color salience and perceptual load can vary as a function of task context, thereby supporting top-down accounts, although the precise aspect of task context remains to be identified.