Abstract

Negative repetition effect (i.e. NRE) has been reported in briefly exposed displays, meaning that adjacent distractor identical to the target decreases the accuracy of target identification. Park (2014) observed that the distractor close to the target showed positive repetition effect when the target appeared at the low-probability location, but not when at the high-probability location, and argued that attentional shifting was responsible for this result. This study aims to check his argument by arranging one attention window at the leftmost and the other at the rightmost position and distractors in between. In Experiment 1, where the probability of target presentation was the same in the two outer position, distractors produced NRE or null effect depending on the arrangement. This result was interpreted as related to the attentional shifting in left-to-right direction. In Experiment 2, the probability of target presentation was varied as high or low in the outer positions, and distractors produced NRE for the target at highly probable positions, but null effect for the target at slightly probable positions. This result was interpreted as that attentional shifting was engaged in producing NRE, and could be explained using zoom lens model of spatial attention.