Allocation of attention in texture segregation, visual search, and location-precuing paradigms.

Is there a common mechanism (or set of mechanisms) that controls the allocation of spatial attention in texture segregation, visual search, and location-precuing tasks? This question was addressed by comparing data from a new set of experiments on texture segregation, in which a common set of stimuli was used across the three paradigms. However, when we ranked the scores for the targets on texture segregation speed, search rate, and improvement due to precuing effects, agreement between these measures was less than perfect. Further analyses of these results led to the following conclusions: (a) speed of texture segregation is affected by perceptual aspects of the display other than the attentional salience of a particular target; (b) visual search rate and the size of precuing effects are strongly related over most of the set of targets we used; and (c) some cases in which search rate was not consistent with size of precue effects may be related to the presence of nearby distractors in the search task.