Priming of visual search strongly affects visual function, releasing items from crowding and during free-choice primed targets are chosen over unprimed ones. Two accounts of priming have been proposed: attentional facilitation of primed features and postperceptual episodic memory retrieval that involves mapping responses to visual events. Here, well-known masking effects were used to assess the two accounts. Object-substitution masking has been considered to reflect attentional processing: It does not occur when a target is precued and is strengthened when distractors are present. Conversely, metacontrast masking has been connected to lower level processing where attention exerts little effect. If priming facilitates attention shifts, it should mitigate object-substitution masking, while lower level masking might not be similarly influenced. Observers searched for an odd-colored target among distractors. Unpredictably (on 20% of trials), object-substitution masks or metacontrast masks appeared around the target. Object-substitution masking was strongly mitigated for primed target colors, while metacontrast masking was mostly unaffected. This argues against episodic retrieval accounts of priming, placing the priming locus firmly within the realm of attentional processing. The results suggest that priming of visual search facilitates attention shifts to the target, which allows better spatiotemporal resolution that overcomes object-substitution masking.
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