Peremen Ziv, Hilo Rinat, Lamy Dominique
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
J Vis. 2013 Apr 1;13(5):1. doi: 10.1167/13.5.1.
Intertrial repetition priming plays a striking role in visual search. For instance, when searching for a target with a unique color, performance is substantially better when the specific color of the target repeats on successive trials (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994). Recent research has relied on objective measures of performance to show that priming improves the perceptual quality of the repeated target. Here, we examined the relation between priming and conscious perception of the target by adding a subjective measure of perception. We used backward masking to create liminal perception, that is, different levels of subjectively conscious perception of the target using exactly the same stimulus conditions. The displays in either probe trials (in which priming benefits are measured, experiment 1) or in prime trials (in which memory traces are laid down, experiment 2) were masked. The results showed that intertrial priming improves full access to awareness of the repeated target but only for targets that already achieved partial access to awareness. In addition, they show that full awareness of the target is necessary in both the prime and probe trials for intertrial priming effects to emerge. Implications for the role of implicit short-term memory in visual search are discussed.
试次间重复启动效应在视觉搜索中起着显著作用。例如，当搜索具有独特颜色的目标时，如果目标的特定颜色在连续试次中重复出现，搜索表现会显著更好（马尔科维奇和中山，1994）。最近的研究依靠表现的客观测量方法来表明启动效应提高了重复目标的感知质量。在此，我们通过增加感知的主观测量方法来研究启动效应与目标的意识知觉之间的关系。我们使用后向掩蔽来创建阈下知觉，也就是说，在完全相同的刺激条件下对目标产生不同水平的主观意识知觉。在探测试次（用于测量启动效应，实验1）或启动试次（用于形成记忆痕迹，实验2）中的显示都进行了掩蔽。结果表明，试次间启动效应改善了对重复目标的完全意识通达，但仅针对那些已经实现部分意识通达的目标。此外，结果还表明，在启动试次和探测试次中，目标的完全意识对于试次间启动效应的出现都是必要的。我们还讨论了内隐短期记忆在视觉搜索中的作用。
