ALLOCATION OF ATTENTION IN TEXTURE SEGREGATION, VISUAL-SEARCH, AND LOCATION-PRECUING PARADIGMS

Is there a common mechanism (or set of mechanisms) that controls the a llocation of spatial attention in texture segregation, visual search, and location-precuing tasks? This question was addressed by comparing data from our previous research on location-cuing and search tasks wit h data from a new set of experiments on texture segregation, in which a common set of stimuli was used across the three paradigms. However, when we ranked the scores for the targets on texture segregation speed , search rate, and improvement due to precuing effects, agreement betw een these measures was less than perfect. Further analyses of these re sults led to the following conclusions: (a) speed of texture segregati on is affected by perceptual aspects of the display other than the att entional salience of a particular target; (b) visual search rate and t he size of precuing effects are strongly related over most of the set of targets we used; and (c) some cases in which search rate was not co nsistent with size of precue effects may be related to the presence of nearby distractors in the search task.