Mechanisms for precuing superiority in visual recognition.

Superior recognition, when similar alternatives are studied prior to brief target pictures of common objects, is usually attributed to selective feature analysis, which is beneficial only when the target is not readily discriminable in the alternatives. The present study found equal precuing superiority, however, for similar and dissimilar alternatives with abstract geometric stimuli, and with pictures of common objects, precuing superiority occurred only when each alternative represented the same semantic category. Precuing effects did not appear when different categories were represented in the alternatives, and performance was similar to other conditions in which only a categorical match between target and alternatives was possible. These results suggest that selective feature analysis and precuing superiority only occur when the target cannot be identified by its semantic category. With dissimilar alternatives activation of the target's category can be used to select a response, and there is no benefit from precuing.