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Reliability and generality of the novel pop-out effect following passive pre-exposure to array items

John D. McCarthy, Phil Reed Orcid Logo

Current Psychology, Volume: 43, Pages: 4567 - 4578

Swansea University Author: Phil Reed Orcid Logo

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Abstract

Novel pop-out refers to the relative ease in locating an unfamiliar target against a background of familiar distractors in visual search tasks. For instance, when one novel item is presented along with three familiar items, it is located faster than when the target is itself familiar, or when all it...

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Published in: Current Psychology
ISSN: 1046-1310 1936-4733
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2024
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa62991
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Abstract: Novel pop-out refers to the relative ease in locating an unfamiliar target against a background of familiar distractors in visual search tasks. For instance, when one novel item is presented along with three familiar items, it is located faster than when the target is itself familiar, or when all items are novel or familiar. However, the reliability and generality of the novel pop-out effect has been questioned. Three experiments with human participants examined the reliability of within-array novel pop-out effects, and explored the conditions under which these effects can be obtained. The degree to which subjects could identify a novel item when presented against a background of familiar items, or against a background of other novel items, was assessed using two different visual search tasks. Experiments 1 and 3replicated the theoretically important within-array novel pop-out effect, using the original procedure adopted by Johnston and colleagues. In the current studies, the array items were rendered novel or familiar by virtue of their previous absence or presence, respectively, in a pre-exposure phase, which allowed greater control over their novelty or familiarity. However, the use of this procedure abolished the typically-reported advantage for all-familiar versus all-novel arrays (Experiments 2 and 3). It is suggested that any model of attention should be sensitive to the present goal state of the subject, and that the literature on latent inhibition may provide one such mechanism through which such a set of effects could be explained.
Keywords: novel pop-out, familiar sink-in, attention
College: Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences
Funders: Swansea University
Start Page: 4567
End Page: 4578