False Pop Out

A single, unique target often pops out quickly and efficiently from a field of homogenous distractors in visual search. Pop out has helped shape theories of visual attention and feature integration as well as to identify basic features in human vision. The present experiments demonstrate a new phenomenon, false pop out, wherein one of the homogenous distractors competes with the singleton target to pop out, perhaps by breaking an overall grouping or pattern emerging from the display. Using a compilation of several studies, this research reports the effect in a number of display contexts using a number of different stimuli, and provides converging evidence toward the idea that low and high level features contribute equally to the primary perceptual experience, a counterintuitive finding for most current theories of visual search