Task probability and report of feature information: What you know about what you ‘see’ depends on what you expect to need

•Task probability determines awareness of object feature information.•Such effects were apparent despite the minimal cognitive demands of our task.•The effects were found to occur independent of display set size.•Results are evidence of independence of feature based and spatial attention.

We investigated the influence of dimensional set on report of object feature information using an immediate memory probe task. Participants viewed displays containing up to 36 coloured geometric shapes which were presented for several hundred milliseconds before one item was abruptly occluded by a probe. A cue presented simultaneously with the probe instructed participants to report either about the colour or shape of the probe item. A dimensional set towards the colour or shape of the presented items was induced by manipulating task probability — the relative probability with which the two feature dimensions required report. This was done across two participant groups: One group was given trials where there was a higher report probability of colour, the other a higher report probability of shape. Two experiments showed that features were reported most accurately when they were of high task probability, though in both cases the effect was largely driven by the colour dimension. Importantly the task probability effect did not interact with display set size. This is interpreted as tentative evidence that this manipulation influences feature processing in a global manner and at a stage prior to visual short term memory.