ABSTRACT
Inefficient search for conjunction targets occurs even when search for features making up the conjunction is efficient and minimally affected by non-targets. This chapter discusses three experiments. In the first experiment, participants search for a common object presented among a set of other common objects. Experimental sessions were preceded with a practice session to familiarize participants with the task and ensure that they could correctly identify target items. The first experiment reports that search for a familiar color-form conjunction was uniquely efficient compared with the baselines. The second experiment generalized the results from first experiment to different stimuli and evaluates the effect of the nontarget color by orthogonally varying whether targets and nontargets were in correct or incorrect colors. The third experiment evaluated whether the advantage for familiar color-form conjunction was due to a top-down set adopted when we search for a known object. The color assignment of the targets and nontargets covaried.
