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Previewing distractors facilitates efficient detection of a target appearing subsequently with any remaining distractors. Visual marking, specifically, top-down inhibition of old items, is induced by the inhibitory template that forms while previewing old items, and continues to be maintained during the target search. Extant studies have examined inhibitory template characteristics using additional tasks or events. In the present study, an endogenous cueing paradigm was combined to examine the interaction between spatial facilitation of cueing and the ability to inhibit old items. An endogenous cue was presented during the preview period, resulting in competition between two top-down controls, endogenous orienting and the inhibitory template; endogenous spatial cueing and visual marking effects did not simply function concurrently. Rather, either of them could be effective alternately for one trial. These findings suggest that the inhibitory template cannot function concurrently with another top-down control for visual search, though it is not damaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of searching for targets, our visual system not only prioritizes target-relevant features, but can also suppress nontarget-related features. Although this template for rejection has been well demonstrated, whether the features (i.e. the objects) or locations are suppressed remains unresolved due to the experimental paradigms in previous studies: in particular, object-based templates for rejection were confounded with location-based inhibition in visual search paradigms. The present study examined an object-based template for rejection by introducing search arrays comprised of two overlapping shapes with search items distributed along the shape's contours. To discourage location-based inhibition, the two shapes were spatially intermingled (Experiment 1), rotated (Experiment 2), or jiggled (Experiment 3). Participants identified the colour of a target cross. The pre-cue indicated the shape in which the target would appear (positive cue condition), the shape in which only distractors would appear (negative cue condition), or the shape that was irrelevant to the current search array (neutral cue condition). In all three experiments, the reaction times for the negative cue condition were shorter than those for the neutral cue condition, which is a hallmark of the object-based template for rejection effect, even under conditions in which location-based inhibition was discouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation methods are designed to yield a representative sample of all redistricting plans that satisfy statutory guidelines and requirements such as contiguity, population parity, and compactness. A proposed redistricting plan can be considered gerrymandered if it constitutes an outlier relative to this sample according to partisan fairness metrics. Despite their growing use, an insufficient effort has been made to empirically validate the accuracy of the simulation methods. We apply a recently developed computational method that can efficiently enumerate all possible redistricting plans and yield an independent sample from this population. We show that this algorithm scales to a state with a couple of hundred geographical units. Finally, we empirically examine how existing simulation methods perform on realistic validation datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]