視覚的印付けに伴う抑制の位置に基づく波及効果

抄録

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 (visual marking). It has been proposed that this effect is due to the inhibition of the locations of the old items. Previous study (Osugi, Kumada, & Kawahara, 2009) investigated the effect of inhibition overreaching boundaries to encompass neighboring regions. The results indicated that the inhibitory visual marking was not applied to the exact locations of the individual old items but was instead applied to grouped locations encompassing the old items. The present study examined whether the reaction time searching for the target was affected by the inhibition overreaching from the neighboring old items. The result revealed that preview benefits were abolished when the target was presented between two neighboring old items. However, search priority of the target was over the old distractors even when the target was presented between old items. This is consistent with view that the inhibitory template for visual marking represents clusters of old items.