Visual marking survives graphical change if meaning is retained

When some distractors (old items) appear before others (new items) in an inefficient visual search task, the old items are excluded from the search (visual marking). Previous studies have shown that shape changes of static old items are sufficient to eliminate this effect when global luminance is maintained, suggesting that shape identity must be maintained for successful visual marking. It was unclear whether the change in meaning or shape was critical, because these changes were confounded in previous studies. The present study examined whether consistency in the semantic or the graphical identity of old items is critical for visual marking by introducing shape change in the absence of meaning change. The results indicated that visual marking survived graphical changes in old items as long as their meaning was maintained, suggesting that the memory template underlying visual marking represents the semantic identity of old items.