Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We found an unexpected positive effect of target-to-distractorsimilarity (TD) in a visual search task, despite overwhelmingevidence in the literature that TD similarity hurts visual searchperformance. Participants with no prior knowledge of Chineseperformed 12 hour-long sessions over 4 weeks, where they hadto find a briefly presented target character among a set ofdistractors. At the beginning of the experiment, TD similarityhurt performance, but the effect reversed during the firstsession and remained positive throughout the remainingsessions. We present a simple connectionist model thataccounts for that reversal of TD similarity effects on visualsearch and we discuss possible theoretical explanations.