Learned associations serve as target proxies during difficult but not easy visual search

The target template contains information in memory that is used to guide attention during visual search. The target template is typically thought of as containing features of the actual target object. However, when targets are hard to find, it is advantageous to use other information in the visual environment that is predictive of the target’s location to help guide attention. The purpose of these studies was to test if newly learned associations between face and scene category images lead observers to use scene information as a proxy for the face target. Our results found that scene information was used as a proxy for the target to guide attention but only when the target face was difficult to discriminate from the distractor face; when the faces were easy to distinguish, attention was no longer guided by the scene proxy. The results suggest that attention is flexibly guided by both target features as well as features of objects that are predictive of the target location. The degree to which each contributes to guiding attention depends on the efficiency with which that information can be used to decode the location of the target. The results contribute to the view that attentional guidance is highly flexible in its use of information to rapidly locate the target.