Esha Brar
Pronouns: she/hers/her
Research Mentor(s): Han Zhang
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program:
Authors: Esha Brar, John Jonides, Han Zhang
Session: Session 3: 11:00 am – 11: 50 am
Poster: 9
Abstract
Statistical regularities in a visual environment have been known to influence visual attention. While several studies have looked at spatial and feature regularities, few studies have examined mechanisms of temporal regularities within visual search tasks. Our present study investigated whether temporal regularities can influence visual selection. We hypothesized that having a temporarily predictable distractor would facilitate search performance. We asked an online sample of 25 participants to count the number of unique shape targets among five rapidly presented search frames, while also ignoring a visually salient distractor. Critically, we manipulated the temporal location of the salient distractor, such that the distractor had a higher probability of appearing on the second frame. We recorded participants’ response accuracy for the number of reported targets, as indicated by their mouse clicks. Our results partially confirmed our hypothesis: we did find that distractor temporal regularity facilitated visual search, but only when the target did not appear on the same frame as the distractor. When the distractor and target did appear on the same frame, performance was worse in the high regularity condition. We interpret these findings as participants simply ignoring the entire frame as a result of learning the distractor’s temporal regularity. These results attest to the unintended consequence of participants learning the visual regularities in the environment.
