Distinct, but top-down modulable color and positional priming mechanisms in visual pop-out search

Three experiments examined reaction time (RT) performance in visual pop-out search. Search displays comprised of one color target and two distractors which were presented at 24 possible locations on a circular ellipse. Experiment 1 showed that re-presentation of the target at a previous target location led to expedited RTs, whereas presentation of the target at a distractor location led to slowed RTs (relative to target presentation at a previous empty location). RTs were also faster when the color of the target was the same across consecutive trials, relative to a change of the target’s color. This color priming was independent of the positional priming. Experiment 2 revealed larger positional facilitation, relative to Experiment 1, when position repetitions occurred more likely than chance level; analogously, Experiment 3 revealed stronger color priming effects when target color repetitions were more likely. These position and color manipulations did not change the pattern of color (Experiment 2) and positional priming effects (Experiment 3). While these results support the independency of color and positional priming effects (e.g., Maljkovic and Nakayama in Percept Psychophys 58:977–991, 1996), they also show that these (largely ‘automatic’) effects are top-down modulable when target position and color are predictable (e.g., Müller et al. in Vis Cogn 11:577–602, 2004)