Phasic alerting in visual search tasks

Many tasks require one to search for and find important objects in the visual environment. Visual search is strongly supported by cues indicating target objects to mechanisms of selective attention, which enable one to prioritise targets and ignore distractor objects. Besides selective attention, a major influence on performance across cognitive tasks is phasic alertness, a temporary increase of arousal induced by warning stimuli (alerting cues). Alerting cues provide no specific information on whose basis selective attention could be deployed, but have nevertheless been found to speed up perception and simple actions. It is still unclear, however, how alerting affects visual search. Therefore, in the present study, participants performed a visual search task with and without preceding visual alerting cues. Participants had to report the orientation of a target among several distractors. The target saliency was low in Experiment 1 and high in Experiment 2. In both experiments, we found that visual search was faster when a visual alerting cue was presented before the target display. Performance benefits occurred irrespective of how many distractors had been presented along with the target. Taken together, the findings reveal that visual alerting supports visual search independently of the complexity of the search process and the demands for selective attention.