Abstract
A salient item usually captures our attention in visual search. When a distractor is salient, it should help observers to find a target that was overlapping it. However, in Jingling and Tseng (in press Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance doi: 10.1037/a0027325), a target overlapping with a salient distractor took longer to discriminate than that which was non-overlapped, if the salient distractor was grouped by collinearity. One of the reasons for prolonged responses in overlapping targets is that the collinear distractor was not contingent on the attentional control setting of task requirements. More specifically, the target was a broken bar, which might induce an attentional control setting on searching for discontinuity. Meanwhile, the distractor was grouped continuously, which was against the attentional control setting and generated interference to the overlapping target. In this study, we modified the definition of the target and tested whether the interference was preserved when the attentional control setting was not on discontinuity. The target was either a diamond or a square, and was either overlapping or not with the collinear salient distractor. Participants discriminated the shape of the target. The results replicated our previous study in that overlapping targets were harder to find. Our result argued against the possibility that the interference was induced by conflicts between the collinear distractor and the attentional control setting, implying that the interference might have been generated from earlier perceptual processing.