Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Three experiments were designed to examine the influence of shape feature and stimulus familiarity on saccadic selectivity during visual search. Robust shape feature based guidance was found in Experiment 1. In contrast, familiarity-based guidance was much smaller in magnitude and was observed with an unfamiliar target (Experiments 2 & 3) but not with a familiar target (Experiments 1, 2 & 3). Results from the current study suggest that there are qualitative and quantitative differences between the saccadic selectivity produced by stimulus familiarity and that produced by low-level features.