Visual search performance depends on the interplay between bottom-up saliency and top-down attentional control. According to the V1 Saliency Hypothesis (V1SH) and the Central-peripheral Dichotomy (CPD) theory, gaze during search should be guided exogenously by saliency signals generated in the primary visual cortex (V1), especially in the peripheral visual field, and by goal-directed recognition in the central visual field. Liang et al. (2023) provided eye-movement evidence for these theories using disk-pairs stimuli, where the target is a homo-pair of same-colored dots (black or white) while non-targets are uniformly oriented hetero-pairs of dots. Due to V1 neural properties, a homo-pair evokes a higher V1 response than a hetero-pair, and intracortical interactions reduce mutual suppression when the two pairs are parallel (Zhaoping, 2020). Indeed, Liang et al. observed a parallel advantage: when the target was parallel to distractors, gaze reached it faster, particularly for targets in the peripheral visual field. Furthermore, they observed a looking-without-seeing phenomenon: gaze was captured by highly peripheral targets even when they were unrecognizable due to visual crowding.

The present study inverts this configuration: the target is a hetero-pair among homo-pair distractors. This inversion is expected to reduce target’s bottom-up saliency, increasing reliance on top-down guidance of gaze and attention. Accordingly, V1SH and CPD theory predict the following: in the central visual field there is an enhanced perpendicular advantage, in the peripheral visual field, parallel advantage and looking-without-seeing should be weakened or absent. We plan to report our findings after recording and analyzing our eye-tracking and search-performance data.