Looking and listening: A comparison of intertrial repetition effects in visual and auditory search tasks

Previous research shows that performance on pop-out search tasks is facilitated when the target and distractors repeat across trials compared to when they switch. This phenomenon has been shown for many different types of visual stimuli. We tested whether the effect would extend beyond visual stimuli to the auditory modality. Using a temporal search task that has previously been shown to elicit priming of pop-out with visual stimuli (Yashar & Lamy, Psychological Science, 21(2), 243-251, 2010), we showed that priming of pop-out does occur with auditory stimuli and has characteristics similar to those of an analogous visual task. These results suggest that either the same or similar mechanisms might underlie priming of pop-out in both modalities.