Context isn't everything: Search performance is influenced by the nature of the task but not the background

AbstractIt has been demonstrated in the literature that cues in the environment that are predictive of how a task ought to be performed can influence performance. In an extension of this general notion, Cosman and Vecera (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(3), 836-848, 2013) reported that simply performing singleton and feature search tasks when irrelevant scenes were displayed in the background automatically modulated the search strategies adopted by participants when these scenes were reinstated at a later time. While intriguing, this result was also somewhat surprising given that an adaptive system (like the human brain) should disregard irrelevant information so task competencies generalize across environments. To investigate this issue further, we replicated the experimental procedures of Cosman and Vecera, while varying whether the test phase was either a singleton search (Experiments 1 and 3) or a feature search (Experiment 2) task. While it was observed that the nature of the search task varied whether a color singleton distractor influenced performance, there was no evidence that background scenes modulated the search strategies adopted by participants, contrasting the results of Cosman and Vecera. Overall, the findings here support the conclusion that the visual system prioritizes task-relevant information while disregarding irrelevant background information.