Exploring the contributions of spatial and non-spatial working memory to priming of pop-out.

Priming of pop-out (PoP) refers to the facilitation of performance that occurs when a target-defining feature is repeated across consecutive trials in a pop-out oddball search task. The underlying mechanism of PoP has been poorly understood and raises important questions about how our visual system is guided by past experiences, even during bottom-up processing. Lee, Mozer, and Vecera (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71, 1059-1071, 2009) demonstrated that PoP remained unaffected by a concurrent non-spatial visual working memory (VWM) load, and they concluded that PoP occurs through feature gain modulation, essentially eliminating the contribution of memory representations in VWM to PoP.

Trial history effects in the ventral attentional network.

The ventral attentional network (VAN) is thought to drive "stimulus driven attention" [e.g., Asplund, C.