Temporal Consistency Is Currency in Shifts of Transient Visual Attention

BACKGROUND: Observers respond more accurately to targets in visual search tasks that share properties with previously presented items, and transient attention can learn featural consistencies on a precue, irrespective of its absolute location. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We investigated whether such attentional benefits also apply to temporal consistencies. Would performance on a precued Vernier acuity discrimination task, followed by a mask, improve if the cue-lead times (CLTs; 50, 100, 150 or 200 ms) remained constant between trials compared to when they changed? The results showed that if CLTs remained constant for a few trials in a row, Vernier acuity performance gradually improved while changes in CLT from one trial to the next led to worse than average discrimination performance. The results show that transient attention can quickly adjust to temporal regularities, similarly to spatial and featural regularities. Further experiments show that this form of learning is not under voluntary control. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The results add to a growing literature showing how consistency in visual presentation improves visual performance, in this case temporal consistency.