Same-Location Costs in Peripheral Cueing: The Role of Cue Awareness and Feature Changes Tobias Schoeberl, Thomas Ditye, and Ulrich Ansorge University of Vienna Prior studies using the peripheral cueing paradigm have shown that singleton cues that do not match to the top-down search settings of the observer can impair performance in visual search when the cue appears at the target location (in valid conditions) compared with when the cue appears at a location away from the target (in invalid conditions). This pattern, the same-location cost (SLC), has recently been suggested to originate from an awareness-dependent updating of object files in working memory. It has also been argued that the processes underlying the SLC could have obscured results of prior studies by masking attentional capture effects by peripheral cues under certain conditions. Here, we investigated to which extent the object-file updating hypothesis can be generalized and delineate necessary side conditions for object-file updating to produce the SLC. In Experiments 1 to 3, we show that during search for spatial frequencies, SLCs emerged that are at odds with the object-file updating hypothesis. SLCs were not dependent on cue awareness and were, unlike SLCs with color cues and targets (Experiment 4), not entirely eliminated where feature updating was necessary in valid and invalid conditions. We conclude that some instances of the SLC can be explained by object-file updating, but, as the present study shows, other instances of the SLC are at odds with this explanation and are therefore more likely of an attentional origin. We end with a discussion of which side conditions might favor the emergence of SLCs as a result of object-file updating. Public Significance Statement Investigating the mechanisms of visual attention and working memory is important to understand how people select specific objects in the environment and how these objects are perceived and processed. The present study provides insights into the origin of the same-location cost (SLC), an effect which occurs in peripheral cueing experiments in which mechanisms of goal-directed and automatic attention are com- monly studied. This effect is assumed to be the consequence of object-file updating in working memory and could have obscured some part of the evidence for top-down independent attention capture in the debate on the responsible mechanisms in attentional selection. Here, we investigated the underlying mechanisms. We delineate side conditions that are necessary for the SLC to arise as a result of object-file updating and show that not all instances of the SLC can be ascribed to object-file updating. Keywords: attention, awareness, object-file updating, same-location cost Much of the debate on visual attention in the last decades has focused on the question to which extent the allocation of visual attention is contingent on the observer’s top-down control set- tings (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992) and to which extent attentional capture is driven by stimulus saliency (Theeu- wes, 2010). Lamy and colleagues have recently proposed an idea which may be an important step toward a resolution of the ongoing debate (Carmel & Lamy, 2015). According to their hypothesis, the results of numerous peripheral-cueing studies of top-down control in visual attention (see Folk et al., 1992) might have been obscured by costs that arise from the updating of an object file in visual working memory. In the peripheral cueing paradigm, participants usually search for a target which is defined by a specific searched-for feature and which can appear randomly at one out of several possible display loca- tions. For example, participants may be instructed to search for the red item (i.e., a red target) among differently colored distractors. In these conditions, prior to the target display, a cue can be presented. The cue is typically a feature singleton—that is, it pops out by a unique feature (e.g., it is green) within a feature dimension (e.g., color) relative to the other more ho- mogeneous (e.g., gray) items. The singleton cue can then either match or not match to the top-down attentional control settings of the observer. For example, when participants search for red targets among yellow nontarget distractors, a red singleton cue This article was published Online First August 17, 2017. Tobias Schoeberl, Thomas Ditye, and Ulrich Ansorge, Department of Psychology, University of Vienna. The authors thank the reviewer, Dominique Lamy for helpful comments and remarks on a previous version of this article. The authors thank Svenja Fux, Luis Huber, Lea Kovac ˇ, and Adriana Ioana Negrea for their help with data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tobias Schoeberl, Department of Psychology, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5, 1010 Wien, Austria. E-mail: tobiasschoeberl11@gmail.com This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance © 2017 American Psychological Association 2018, Vol. 44, No. 3, 433– 451 0096-1523/18/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000470 433