Figure 1.

Accounting for conjunction search. Three influential accounts of conjunction search are depicted. In all cases search is for a vertical red bar, amongst vertical green and horizontal red bars. (A) Illustrates the basic location based cross referencing scheme that is the core of Feature integration Theory (FIT). (B) Illustrates the inhibitory revision of FIT proposed by Treisman and Sato (1990), and (C) illustrates the guided search revision proposed by Wolfe et al. (1989). (A) FIT: stimuli are decomposed into constituent features. Serial spatial selection by attention serves to recombine features based on location. (B) Feature inhibition revision of FIT: inhibition of distractors with non-target features (dotted lines) leaves target as only remaining uninhibited item. (C) Guided search revision of FIT: activation from target features is summed in an activation map. Spatial attention selects location with highest activation. Dotted lines indicate activation of activation map. Blue columns represent activation levels. Blue arrow represents direction of spatial selection by activation.