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A clash of bottom-up and top-down processes in visual search: the reversed letter effect revisited.

<22>Originality: using a new behavioral experimental design to dissect human gaze shift behaviour in visual search, this paper reveals unforeseen causes for a well known phenomenon in human visual behavior, discovered in 1974. Significance: The work showed that the cause of the phenomenon had been misunderstood, casting doubts on the validity of a decade-old psychological framework for visual saliency in attention. The work also questions the limited utility of manual reaction time measurements in visual search; its finding should cause a change in the way researchers have for 30 to 40 years carried out visual search experiments in human vision.