Donald (Alex) Varakin¹, Egypt Frye¹, Steven Pesina¹; ¹Eastern Kentucky University

Some studies, such as those on contextual cuing, suggest that repeatedly searching through the same display leads to faster and more efficient searches. Pesina and Varakin (2020, VSS) demonstrated that in some situations, searching through the same array on consecutive trials makes searches slower and less efficient. The current experiment utilized a repeated search paradigm in which search configurations repeated for eight consecutive trials as participants searched for a rotated T among rotated L’s (set sizes of 8, 12, or 16). In the target-replaces-distractor condition (an exact replication of Pesina and Varakin, 2020), the target appeared in a different location within the array on each trial in a repetition series, appearing at a random location on the first trial and a location previously occupied by a distractor on the second through eighth trials. Replicating the prior results, search efficiency decreased from about 39ms/item to 52ms/item from the first to the eighth repetition. One possible explanation for this result is that locations occupied by distractors are inhibited, and the inhibition carries over from trial to trial within a repetition series. To test this idea, we included a target-replaces-empty condition, which was identical to the target-replaces-distractor condition, except that the search target appeared in a previously empty location on each trial in a repetition series, rather than a location previously occupied by a distractor. The inhibition-carryover explanation would not predict a decrease in efficiency in the new condition, since the target is not appearing at a location that could have been inhibited from previous searches. However, search efficiency again decreased from the first to the eighth search, from about 37ms/item to 50ms/item. These results suggest that the decrease in search efficiency is not due to the target replacing a distractor, but to something else about how the displays repeated.