Look before you seek: Preview adds a fixed benefit to all searches

Knowing in advance what to look for speeds up search, but how this knowledge guides search is poorly understood. The little available evidence suggests that previewing the target produces larger reductions in search times for harder searches. To investigate this issue further, we performed seven experiments in which subjects searched for an oddball target after previewing the target, distracter, or an unrelated square. Consistent with previous studies, harder searches showed bigger reductions in search time for an informative preview. However, the same data replotted using the reciprocal of search time showed a remarkably different result: The informative preview showed a fixed additive increase in reciprocal search time across all searches regardless of difficulty. This is a nontrivial outcome because it cannot be explained using a simple relationship between search times in the informative and uninformative preview conditions. We interpret our findings by proposing that the reciprocal of search time reflects the strength of an underlying accumulating signal related to the distinctiveness or salience of the target over the distracters and that preview additively increases this signal for all searches. This in turn implies that the top-down signals related to target preview and bottom-up signals related to target-distracter salience sum linearly.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Journal of Vision

• Publication date

  2016-12-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1167/16.15.3PMID 27919099PMCID 5142796
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Object attributes combine additively in visual search

  2016cited by this paper
• Taming the White Bear

  2016cited by this paper
• Selective attention in birds.

  2014cited by this paper
• Features in visual search combine linearly.

  2014cited by this paper
• Priming and the guidance by visual and categorical templates in visual search

  2014cited by this paper
• Target features and target–distractor relation are both primed in visual search

  2014cited by this paper
• Effects of target typicality on categorical search.

  2014cited by this paper
• The time it takes to turn a memory into a template.

  2013cited by this paper
• Does linear separability really matter? Complex visual search is explained by simple search.

  2013cited by this paper
• Distinct neural mechanisms of distractor suppression in the frontal and parietal lobe

  2012cited by this paper
• Turning visual search time on its head.

  2012cited by this paper
• Searching through the hierarchy: How level of target categorization affects visual search

  2012cited by this paper
• Visual search guidance is best after a short delay.

  2011cited by this paper
• The role of search difficulty in intertrial feature priming.

  2011influential reference
• Neural mechanisms of saccade target selection: gated accumulator model of the visual–motor cascade

  2011cited by this paper
• Visual attention: the past 25 years.

  2011influential reference
• Visual search is guided to categorically-defined targets.

  2009cited by this paper
• Short article: Search guidance is proportional to the categorical specificity of a target cue

  2009cited by this paper
• Guided Search 4.0: Current Progress With a Model of Visual Search

  2007cited by this paper
• Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems

  2007cited by this paper
• LIP responses to a popout stimulus are reduced if it is overtly ignored

  2006cited by this paper
• Attention Lights Up New Object Representations before the Old Ones Fade Away

  2006cited by this paper
• Real-world visual search is dominated by top-down guidance.

  2006cited by this paper
• Setting up the target template in visual search.

  2005influential reference
• How fast can you change your mind? The speed of top-down guidance in visual search.

  2004influential reference
• Changing your mind: on the contributions of top-down and bottom-up guidance in visual search for feature singletons.

  2003cited by this paper
• Visual marking: prioritizing selection for new objects by top-down attentional inhibition of old objects.

  1997cited by this paper
• The Psychophysics Toolbox.

  1997cited by this paper
• journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/visres

  year unknowncited by this paper

• Visual homogeneity computations in the brain enable solving property-based visual tasks

  2025cites this paper
• Bridging Neuromarketing and Data Analytics in Tourism: An Adaptive Digital Marketing Framework for Hotels and Destinations

  2025cites this paper
• Repetition Suppression for Mirror Images of Objects and Not Braille Letters in the Ventral Visual Stream of Congenitally Blind Individuals

  2024cites this paper
• Using compositionality to understand parts in whole objects

  2022cites this paper
• Letter processing in upright bigrams predicts reading fluency variations in children.

  2022cites this paper
• Modulations of Depth Responses in the Human Brain by Object Context: Does Biological Relevance Matter?

  2021cites this paper
• What do we see behind an occluder? Amodal completion of statistical properties in complex objects

  2021cites this paper
• A compositional neural code in high-level visual cortex can explain jumbled word reading

  2020cites this paper
• Feature integration theory in non-humans: Spotlight on the archerfish

  2020cites this paper
• Voice and Face Gender Perception engages multimodal integration via multiple feedback pathways

  2020cites this paper
• Improving Machine Vision Using Human Perceptual Representations: The Case of Planar Reflection Symmetry for Object Classification

  2020cites this paper
• Consciously detecting and recognizing a past visual word after its sensory trace is gone

  2020cites this paper
• Transcendence and Sublime Experience in Nature: Awe and Inspiring Energy

  2019cites this paper
• A compositional letter code in high-level visual cortex explains how we read jumbled words

  2019cites this paper
• Faces under continuous flash suppression capture attention faster than objects, but without a face-evoked steady-state visual potential: Is curvilinearity responsible for the behavioral effect?

  2019cites this paper
• How the forest interacts with the trees: Multiscale shape integration explains global and local processing

  2019influential citation
• Reading Increases the Compositionality of Visual Word Representations

  2019cites this paper
• A compositional shape code explains how we read jumbled words

  2019cites this paper
• Kanji Writing Acquisition Through Sequential Stimulus Pairing in Japanese Students with Writing Difficulties

  2018cites this paper
• Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study

  2018cites this paper
• Kanji Writing Acquisition Through Sequential Stimulus Pairing in Japanese Students with Writing Difficulties

  2018cites this paper