Top-down influence on bottom-up process: the familiarity effect modulates texture segmentation.

This study deals with the familiarity effect (FE), which means that search performance is better when detecting an unfamiliar target in a familiar context compared to the detection performance of a familiar target in an unfamiliar context. In several experiments the spatial and temporal conditions were systematically varied to determine the ones which enable the appearance of the FE. Data were collected as a function of target eccentricity.