Abstract
Features from the last thing you looked for influence the next thing you look for. Priming has been proposed as a potent source of guidance of attention (Theeuwes, 2013). There is no doubt that attention to, for example, red on one trial, speeds search for red on the next. There are, at least, three ways this might happen. Priming might speed the motor response once the target is located, guide the first deployment of attention, or prioritize all red items in the next search. To test the hypothesis that priming guides the entire subsequent search, observers searched for a red or green letter T, present on every trial, in arrays of red or green Ls. In the localization version of the task, observers clicked on the T. In the 2AFC version, they identified the T as red or green. Color was irrelevant and not predictive. If priming by color persists across the entire search, attention would be biased to all items of the primed color and the slope of the RT x Set Size function would be shallower when the target color remained the same. There was no such reduction in slope. In the localization condition, RTs were faster when colors repeated than when they did not (40 msec diff, t(15) = 5.36, p < 0.01). In the 2AFC condition, this result was replicated (30 msec diff, t(15) = 2.52 p = 0.02). There was no significant effect on slopes in either condition (p > 0.40). These results suggest that priming could influence either the first deployment of attention or the speed of motor response, but they also suggest that sustained color feature priming does not last throughout search. Kristjansson, Wang, & Nakayama (2002) found similar results with a somewhat different task.