The Specificity of Feature-Based Attentional Guidance Is Equivalent Under Single- and Dual-Target Search

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2023-11, Vol.49 (11), p.1430-1446
• Main Authors: Williams, Ryan S., Ferber, Susanne, Pratt, Jay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attentional Capture; Cues; Differentiation; Distraction; Experiments; Female; Human; Male; Memory; Short term memory; Visual Search
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/xhp0001157

Individuals actively maintain attentional templates to prioritize target-matching inputs. While previous works have established that multiple templates can be held simultaneously, current understanding is limited with respect to the representational quality of such templates. We thus investigated: (a) whether the maintenance of two templates is limited to broad, coarse-grained representations, and if not, (b) whether there is nonetheless a decline in the achievable level of specificity when multiple attentional templates are held simultaneously. Using a spatial cueing procedure, we probed the breadth of attentional templates while participants maintained either one (Experiment 1) or two target colors (Experiment 2) under conditions of low- or high-similarity search and found specific template maintenance during high-similarity search for both single- and dual-target conditions. We then directly compared template specificity during single- and dual-target maintenance in Experiment 3, probing at the point of differentiation between target and nontarget feature values observed during single-target search. Here we found no difference in the selectivity of cue validity effects between single- and dual-target search, suggesting equivalent template specificity regardless of whether one or two features are relevant to search. Lastly, in Experiment 4, we established that such template specificity is dependent on access to visual working memory. Public Significance StatementWhen searching for objects in a goal-directed manner, humans rely on internal representations of target objects to guide attention. This study shows that when individuals search for two objects at the same time, they are able to maintain such target representations with the same level of specificity (or precision) as that observed when they searched for only a single target.