A 'popout' effect with words and nonwords

Previous research (Flowers & Lohr, 1985) has not found evidence for the “popout” phenomenon (e.g., Treisman, 1988) with word and nonword letter strings. Flowers and Lohr utilized a visual search task that employed a circular arrangement of stimuli. This format does not optimize spatial contiguity, which has been shown to facilitate stimulus detection in certain contexts (Bryant & Soraci, 1992; Soraci, Carlin, Deckner, & Baumeister, 1990). The present study examined popout with words and nonwords in a same-different task, using a visual array format in which interstimulus contiguity increased with changes in set size. With these arrays, no popout effect was evidenced under conditions of high featural overlap between targets and distractors. However, under conditions of low featural overlap, a popout effect for both words and nonwords was found.