ArticleeLife2019
Humans can efficiently look for but not select multiple visual objects.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identical Attentional Capture with Different Working Memory Representation Precision.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Guidance of Attentional Selectivity in Visual Search Is Always Feature-Based: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence From Feature and Conjunction Search Tasks.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- The capacity limitations of multiple-template visual search during task preparation and target selection.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Cost of maintaining attentional templates for multiple colors revealed by EEG decoding.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Attentional templates for target features versus locations.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Representation and computation in visual working memory.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Assessing satisfaction of search in virtual mammograms for experienced and novice searchers.Journal of medical imaging (Bellingham, Wash.) · 2023Article
- Capacity limitations in template-guided multiple color search.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Altered Processing of Social Emotions in Individuals With Autistic Traits.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Attention expedites target selection by prioritizing the neural processing of distractor features.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Neural mechanism of priming in visual search.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Review
- Three visual working memory representations simultaneously control attention.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The human brain recurrently prioritizes task-relevant over task-irrelevant visual information. A central question is whether multiple objects can be prioritized simultaneously. To answer this, we let observers search for two colored targets among distractors. Crucially, we independently varied the number of target colors that observers anticipated, and the number of target colors actually used to distinguish the targets in the display. This enabled us to dissociate the preparation of selection mechanisms from the actual engagement of such mechanisms. Multivariate classification of electroencephalographic activity allowed us to track selection of each target separately across time. The results revealed only small neural and behavioral costs associated with preparing for selecting two objects, but substantial costs when engaging in selection. Further analyses suggest this cost is the consequence of neural competition resulting in limited parallel processing, rather than a serial bottleneck. The findings bridge diverging theoretical perspectives on capacity limitations of feature-based attention.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.