Effects of Competing Lexical Distracters in a Visual Search Task

Abstract

Studies have shown that distracters that are relevant to a target can negatively affect visual search performance. Recent studies have looked at performance when targets are embedded within a distracter. Various factors have been explored such as automaticity, spatial location and timing. This study asked, "If distracters affected a different dimension would that produce a detriment to visual search performance"? Would competition for attention occur if distracters were on an irrelevant dimension such as lexicality? The results of this study suggest that lexicality, as demonstrated by word frequency, is a disruptive distracter dimension. This study also showed that two distracters of different word frequencies can serve to disrupt attentional capture.