Abstract
Our world is dynamic, with various items coming in and out of view at different times. An efficient cognitive system should be able to allocate attention to relevant spatial locations, features, and moments in time. For example, when searching for a taxi you have ordered, you may hold expectations about the taxi’s colour, likely location, and time of arrival. Recent work using a novel dynamic visual search task has shown that spatiotemporal regularities can be used to guide attention towards targets in space and time. However, it remains unclear if feature-temporal regularities can also be used to improve our visual search performance. That is, when we hold no spatial expectations (i.e., we cannot predict the direction the taxi will arrive from), can we guide our attention based on featural and temporal expectations? We investigated this using an online dynamic visual search task that required participants to find and click on multiple targets in a search display. Targets and distractors faded in and out of view at different times during trials. The task contained feature-temporal regularities in that half of the targets in each trial always appeared in the same colour and at the same time. The remaining half of the targets appeared in an unpredictable colour and at an unpredictable time during trials, making them feature-temporally unpredictable. Participants located targets significantly more often, and significantly faster when they were feature-temporally predictable compared to when they were feature-temporally unpredictable. From this finding, we concluded that participants were able to use the feature-temporal regularities in the dynamic visual search task as a basis for attentional guidance. Further, no participants reported noticing feature-temporal regularities during the task, suggesting this attentional guidance may be implicit.