Target selection biases from recent experience transfer across effectors.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual perception

Background:

• Target selection is influenced by an observer's recent experiences.
• The transferability of these selection biases across different effectors (e.g., eye vs. reach movements) is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether selection biases, such as priming of popout and distractor previewing effects, transfer across different effectors.
• To determine if memory representations guiding attention are independent of specific motor actions.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed visual search tasks requiring either eye movements or reach movements to identify a uniquely colored target.
• Experiment 1 examined "priming of popout" (faster responses to repeated target colors).
• Experiment 2 investigated the "distractor previewing effect" (inhibitory bias away from a previewed color).

Main Results:

• Priming of popout transferred across effectors, meaning target color repetition facilitated performance regardless of whether the action mode was repeated.
• Intertrial suppression biases, observed in the distractor previewing effect, also transferred across effectors.
• These findings indicate that attentional biases are not tied to specific effector systems.

Conclusions:

• Selection biases in target acquisition, driven by recent trial history, are transferable across different motor effectors.
• Attentional control mechanisms influencing target selection appear to operate independently of the specific action (eye or reach) to be performed.