Bistable Perception Is Biased by Search Items but Not by Search Priming.

During visual search, selecting a target facilitates search for similar targets in the future, known as search priming. During bistable perception, in turn, perceiving one interpretation facilitates perception of the same interpretation in the future, a form of sensory memory. Previously, we investigated the relation between these history effects by asking: can visual search influence perception of a subsequent ambiguous display and can perception of an ambiguous display influence subsequent visual search? We found no evidence for such influences, however. Here, we investigated one potential factor that might have prevented such influences from arising: lack of retinal overlap between the ambiguous stimulus and the search array items. In the present work, we therefore interleaved presentations of an ambiguous stimulus with search trials in which the target or distractor occupied the same retinal location as the ambiguous stimulus. Nevertheless, we again found no evidence for influences of visual search on bistable perception, thus demonstrating no close relation between search priming and sensory memory. We did, however, find that visual search items primed perception of a subsequent ambiguous stimulus at the same retinal location, regardless of whether they were a target or a distractor item: a form of perceptual priming. Interestingly, the strengths of search priming and this perceptual priming were correlated on a trial-to-trial basis, suggesting that a common underlying factor influences both.

Evidence for distinct mechanisms underlying attentional priming and sensory memory for bistable perception.

Attentional selection in visual search paradigms and perceptual selection in bistable perception paradigms show functional similarities. For example, both are sensitive to trial history: They are biased toward previously selected targets or interpretations. We investigated whether priming by target selection in visual search and sensory memory for bistable perception are related. We did this by presenting two trial types to observers. We presented either ambiguous spheres that rotated over a central axis and could be perceived as rotating in one of two directions, or search displays in which the unambiguously rotating target and distractor spheres closely resembled the two possible interpretations of the ambiguous stimulus. We interleaved both trial types within experiments, to see whether priming by target selection during search trials would affect the perceptual outcome of bistable perception and, conversely, whether sensory memory during bistable perception would affect target selection times during search. Whereas we found intertrial repetition effects among consecutive search trials and among consecutive bistable trials, we did not find cross-paradigm effects. Thus, even though we could ascertain that our experiments robustly elicited processes of both search priming and sensory memory for bistable perception, these same experiments revealed no interaction between the two.