Does feature intertrial priming guide attention? The jury is still out

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Visual search performance is heavily influenced by prior experience, a phenomenon termed selection history.
• Selection history encompasses effects like intertrial priming, statistical learning, and reward history.
• Prior findings suggest selection history guides attention, challenging the traditional top-down/bottom-up attentional control dichotomy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To re-examine the role of feature intertrial priming (a type of selection history) in attentional guidance.
• To differentiate attentional guidance effects from later selective processes.
• To assess whether feature intertrial priming, across various protocols, exhibits characteristics of top-down attention.

Main Methods:

• Systematic review and re-evaluation of existing experimental evidence on feature intertrial priming.
• Distinguishing between different experimental rationales and protocols used to study feature intertrial priming.
• Analyzing the extent to which feature intertrial priming aligns with top-down attentional control mechanisms.

Main Results:

• Feature intertrial priming demonstrates strong attentional guidance when experimental protocols encourage maintaining critical features in visual working memory or forming target expectations.
• Evidence for attentional guidance by feature intertrial priming in the standard, canonical paradigm remains inconclusive.
• The characteristics of feature intertrial priming vary depending on the specific experimental design.

Conclusions:

• Feature intertrial priming can guide attention, particularly under non-canonical experimental conditions that engage cognitive control mechanisms.
• The impact of feature intertrial priming in standard visual search paradigms requires further investigation.
• Future research should apply similar methodologies to other selection history phenomena to elucidate their role in visual search.