Abstract
In an inefficient visual search task, when some distractors (old items) temporally precede some others (new items) the old items are excluded from the search, a phenomenon termed visual marking. This effect is considered to occur because the locations of the old items are inhibited before the new items appear. The present study used a probe-detection task to examine whether this inhibition occurs selectively at the locations of task-relevant old items or those of task-relevant and task-irrelevant old items. The participants searched for a target, or detected a probe, that appeared after the new items. The results revealed that the probe reaction times at locations of task-relevant old items were longer than those at the locations occupied by task-irrelevant old items and a blank region where no items had been presented. However, a task-relevancy effect was not obtained when the target did not appear at the locations of task-irrelevant old items. We conclude that the inhibitory template for visual marking represents the locations of task-relevant old items selectively.
