Novel Popout: Empirical Boundaries and Tentative Theory

Observers received glimpses of 4-word arrays and were probed for the locations of particular words. Familiar words were repeated across arrays but novel words were not. Accuracy was higher for familiar than for novel arrays, but this baseline difference was diminished when a single novel word appeared with three familiar words. In these arrays, accuracy rose above baseline for novel words, defining novel popout (NPO), and fell below baseline for familiar words, defining familiar sink-in (FSI). In Experiments 1-4, these effects increased directly with field familiarity and associative unitization. In Experiments 5-7, NPO remained intact and FSI actually increased as duration of array exposure was reduced from 200 ms to as brief as 33 ms. At brief exposures, even familiar words popped out from fields in which they had never before appeared. NPO is attributed to the disinhibition of locations associated with bottom-up-top-down mismatches.