Conjunction-guided selection in visual search Igor S. Utochkin The National Research University “Higher School of Economics”, Russia

Guided Search (Wolfe, 1994, 1996; 2006): Features can be used to guide visual search What about conjunctions?

Experiments 1 and 2 Color × Orientation targets Set size: 7, 13, or 37 items Features and conjunctions distribution among distractors: Unknown (Exp. 1) vs. Known (Exp. 2) target 2 features, 1/1 2 conjunctions, 1/1 2 features, 1/2 3 conjunctions, 1/1/1 2 features, 1/2 2 conjunctions, 1/2

Experiments 1 and 2 Results

Experiments 3 and 4 Color × Orientation targets Set size: 7, 13, or 37 items Features and conjunctions distribution among distractors: Unknown (Exp. 3) vs. Known (Exp. 4) target NeutralCongruentIncongruent

Experiments 3 and 4 Results

A “tentative binding” hypothesis Approximate, imprecise but not accidental; Requires some global attentional processing prior to focusing on individuals;

I. Distributed attention binds features approximately (Treisman, 2006) II. Limited-capacity parallel binding (Luck & Vogel, 1997) of samples (Simons & Myszek, 2008)

A “tentative binding” hypothesis Approximate, imprecise but not accidental; Requires some global attentional processing prior to focusing on individuals; Primes subsequent allocation of focused attention

Thank you for attention! Acknowledgements: Yulia Stakina Anna Rakova The study was conducted within the Program for basic research of the Higher School of Economics in 2012