Priming of location (PoL) revisited: Reanalysis of a large-scale database

Where we search for an object is strongly determined by where we recently found it, even if we don’t expect it to remain at the same position. This priming of location (PoL) phenomenon has gained visibility following Maljkovic and Nakayama’s (Maljkovic, V., & Nakayama, K. (1996). Priming of pop-out: II. The role of position. Perception & Psychophysics, 58(7), 977–991. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206826) seminal paper. Here, we revisit these authors’ conclusions on five selected issues: the mechanisms underlying PoL, its spatial profile, the contribution of distractor inhibition, the influence of search context changes, and PoL’s temporal profile. For each issue, we review the relevant follow-up studies and address open questions by taking advantage of an open-source large-scale database of more than 180,000 trials. While we replicate the core findings published on PoL we provide novel insights on each issue. Our findings show that task demands modulate PoL’s spatial characteristics; the inhibitory component was over-estimated in previous studies due to a confound, with PoL mainly indexing facilitation at previous target locations; PoL is sensitive, yet not eliminated, by changes in search context; both passive decay and proactive interference account for PoL’s temporal profile; and the effect of a past search event lasts far longer than previously thought, but its response-based component is much shorter-lived. We discuss limitations and directions for future research.