Abstract
Here, I investigated if color search in the contingent-capture protocol could be based on verbal or semantic top-down templates. I compared search efficiency for color and color-word stimuli in five experiments. As is typical for the contingent-capture protocol, validity effects (shorter search times and fewer errors for validly than invalidly cued targets) were only found for color cues that matched the top-down search templates. In addition, I compared contingent-capture effects of color cues and color-word cues during top-down search for a color target (Experiment 1), a color-word target (Experiment 2), and both color and color-word targets (Experiment 3). Only cues of the same stimulus category as the target (either color cues or color-word cues) captured attention. This makes it unlikely that color search is based on verbal or semantic search templates. These results also argue for stimulus based rather than language based priming effects during search for color-word targets. To look into the role of visual features for these priming effects, I compared color-word cues of matching and non-matching fonts preceding color-word targets in Experiment 4. The cues captured attention regardless of whether the cue font matched the target font. This makes it unlikely that font-based priming accounted for the word cueing effects. In Experiment 5, I investigated the possibility of phonological priming. Participants executed the experiment (color-word cues before color-word targets) while repeating syllables (articulatory suppression) or not. Articulatory suppression had no influence, hence, phonological priming is also unlikely. Together, the results speak for an abstract orthographic nature of cue-based priming during color-word search and show that verbal or semantic search templates do not play a role in contingent-capture by color.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018