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Abstract Irrelevant salient distractors can trigger early quitting in visual search, causing observers to miss targets they might otherwise find. Here, we asked whether task-relevant salient cues can produce a similar early quitting effect on the subset of trials where those cues fail to highlight the target. We presented participants with a difficult visual search task and used two cueing conditions. In the high-predictive condition, a salient cue in the form of a red circle highlighted the target most of the time a target was present. In the low-predictive condition, the cue was far less accurate and did not reliably predict the target (i.e., the cue was often a false positive). These were contrasted against a control condition in which no cues were presented. In the high-predictive condition, we found clear evidence of early quitting on trials where the cue was a false positive, as evidenced by both increased miss errors and shorter response times on target absent trials. No such effects were observed with low-predictive cues. Together, these results suggest that salient cues which are false positives can trigger early quitting, though perhaps only when the cues have a high-predictive value. These results have implications for real-world searches, such as medical image screening, where salient cues (referred to as computer-aided detection or CAD) may be used to highlight potentially relevant areas of images but are sometimes inaccurate. 

Abstract Previous work shows that automatic attention biases toward recently selected target features transfer across action and perception and even across different effectors such as the eyes and hands on a trial-by-trial basis. Although these findings suggest a common neural representation of selection history across effectors, the extent to which information about recently selected target features is encoded in overlapping versus distinct brain regions is unknown. Using fMRI and a priming of pop-out task where participants selected unpredictable, uniquely colored targets among homogeneous distractors via reach or saccade, we show that color priming is driven by shared, effector-independent underlying representations of recent selection history. Consistent with previous work, we found that the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) was commonly activated on trials where target colors were switched relative to those where the colors were repeated; however, the dorsal anterior insula exhibited effector-specific activation related to color priming. Via multivoxel cross-classification analyses, we further demonstrate that fine-grained patterns of activity in both IPS and the medial temporal lobe encode information about selection history in an effector-independent manner, such that ROI-specific models trained on activity patterns during reach selection could predict whether a color was repeated or switched on the current trial during saccade selection and vice versa. Remarkably, model generalization performance in IPS and medial temporal lobe also tracked individual differences in behavioral priming sensitivity across both types of action. These results represent a first step to clarify the neural substrates of experience-driven selection biases in contexts that require the coordination of multiple actions. 

Action is an important arbitrator as to whether an individual or a species will survive. Yet, action has not been well integrated into the study of psychology. Action or motor behavior is a field apart. This is traditional science with its need for specialization. The sequence in a typical laboratory experiment of see → decide → act provides the rationale for broad disciplinary categorizations. With renewed interest in action itself, surprising and exciting anomalous findings at odds with this simplified caricature have emerged. They reveal a much more intimate coupling of vision and action, which we describe. In turn, this prompts us to identify and dwell on three pertinent theories deserving of greater notice.