Visual priming through a boost of the target signal: evidence from saccadic landing positions

Searching for a target is slower when target features change from trial to trial than when they are repeated. Although heavily studied, it is still not wholly clear what process is influenced by such visual priming. Here, we introduce anew measure to study priming. When a target and distractor are in close proximity, fast saccades generally fall in between the two, a finding known as the global effect. We elicited global effect saccades to study the effects of repeating target or distractor colors on overt attention. Saccades landed closer to a target or distractor in the color of a previous target, suggesting that priming enhances target color signals. This was true even for the fastest eye movements, in the range of express saccades. Distractor color repetition, on the other hand, had no effect, at least in isolation. Visual priming is, we conclude, at least partly the result of boosting perceptual target signals [corrected].