Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance
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J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform · Oct 1998
Attentional control during visual search: the effect of irrelevant singletons.
Four experiments investigated whether a highly salient color singleton can be ignored during serial search. Observers searched for a target letter among nontarget letters and were instructed to ignore an irrelevant, highly salient color singleton that was either compatible or incompatible with the response to the target letter. ⋯ The ability to selectively filter singleton distractors during serial search depends on the presence of an attentional set for a specific feature value of both target and distractor. In the absence of a consistently predictable feature value of both target and distractor, top-down control is not possible.