Feature-based control of attention: Evidence for two forms of dimension weighting

Abstract

In three experiments, I examined whether prior knowledge of a target feature dimension is useful for guiding spatial attention to the target in a variety of tasks: visual search (Experiments 1A and 1B), texture segregation (Experiment 2), and visual enumeration (Experiment 3). Experiment 1A used a simple search task and found that reaction times for blocks in which a target was defined within a single feature dimension were shorter than those for blocks in which a target was defined across dimensions (within-dimension facilitation; WDF). Intertrial facilitation (ITF; Müller, Heller, & Ziegler, 1995), a dimension-based priming effect from one trial to the immediately following one, was also observed. Both WDF and ITF disappeared when the same stimuli were used under a compound search task (Experiment 1B), in which participants responded to an attribute of the target in a feature dimension different from its defining dimensions. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that WDF and ITF are not necessarily contingent upon each other: In a texture discrimination task, only WDF was found; in an enumeration task for six or seven targets, only ITF was found. These results show that the two forms of dimension weighting, WDF and ITF, are mediated by different mechanisms. WDF was eliminated when focal attention to targets was required, suggesting that feature-based modulation is limited as a source for controlling spatial attention (Kumada, 1999). ITF was correlated with type of response, suggesting dimension-specific response mechanisms (Cohen & Shoup, 1997).