Visual marking of moving objects: A role for top-down feature-based inhibition in selection

Recently, the authors presented evidence that new items can be prioritized for selection by the top-down attentional inhibition of old stimuli already in the field (visual marking; D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 1997). In this article the authors assess whether this inhibition extends to moving old items and test an alternative account of visual marking. Six experiments showed that old moving items could be inhibited provided they did not undergo abrupt property changes. Further, and in contrast to effects with static stimuli, the marking of old moving stimuli was based on inhibition applied at the level of a whole feature map, rather than at their locations. The results also rule out an alternative account of visual marking based on the top-down weighting of dynamic or static processing pathways.