Abstract
Visual marking, which is based on the assumption that previewing some distractors increases the efficiency of subsequent visual searches, constitutes one of the efficient inhibitions on visual searches. The preview search task consists of a display of a subset of distractors followed by an additional display containing the remaining distractors and a target. During the preview period, an inhibitory template is thought to be formed, resulting in the prioritization of the subsequently presented items and the inhibition of the previewed items. Previous studies have demonstrated the determinants that impair the inhibitory templates resulting in inefficient visual searches when any events consuming attentional resources occurred simultaneously with the onset of additional items. In the present study, we examined whether the inhibitory template would be influenced by another event before the onset of additional items. To this end, we used a cuing paradigm. Under the cue condition, we changed the fixation cross into an endogenous cue (i.e., a right or left arrow) during the preview period. The cueing validity was 75%. The results were that compared with the no-cue control condition, the invalid cue worsened the search performance, though the valid cue lead to the equivalent search performance. These results indicated that an invalid cue degraded the inhibitory template. It might be because attentional resources to maintain the template was depleted during attentional disengagement from the cued space and attentional shift to the opposite space to the cued location. Therefore, the event even before the onset of additional items could influence the inhibitory template only when a visual event could deplete attentional resources afterward.