Abstract
Recent studies for early vision have been reported by using visual search tasks, and most of them have examined the relation between a target and a distractor. However, it is considered that the distractor attribute as a whole might interfares with target search process, when the spatial interaction between distractors (that is, configuration) has regularity. This is a kind of context effects. Two experiments were performed, in which the regularity of distractor configuration and the target embeddedness were manipulated. The comparison between the regular and irregular configurations is performed with a visual search task in which a target arc is searched in distractor straight short lines on an imaginary concentric circles. As the results, in Experiment 1, search reaction times are delayed when the distractor configuration is regular and a target is embedded in distractors. And, in Experiment 2 with salient targets, search reaction time is facilitated when the distractor configuration is regular and a target disrupts the regularity. These results show that visual search process is affected by whole stimulus attribute, like distractor configuration.
