Feature integration in basic detection and localization tasks: Insights from the attentional orienting literature

Once presumed to be intimately related, feature integration and the consequences of attentional orienting are now often studied separately. Yet the paradigms used to study each can be highly similar; participants respond to a stimulus, which is then followed by a second stimulus, matching or mismatching the first on some feature(s). Given the similarities between the methods, it seems likely that these fields each could gain insights regarding their own work by looking at the other. Here we note a peculiarity of feature integration research: It relies on paradigms that require or encourage participants to identify the nonspatial features of a stimulus in order to make the correct response. This leaves open the question of whether feature integration effects can be found in tasks that do not require stimulus identity (e.g., color or shape) processing. To answer this question, we reviewed attentional orienting studies that manipulated whether stimulus identity repeated but that required only detection or localization responses, irrespective of stimulus identity. With one exception, feature integration effects were absent from those experiments. Furthermore, we attempted to replicate the exception and found no feature integration effects. Our review shows that detection and localization paradigms are particularly useful for studying the consequences of attentional orienting in the absence of integration effects, and that these same tasks provide a baseline to understand the sources of feature integration effects with only slightly variations in the basic task.