Previous studies have shown that the efficiency of visual search does not improve when participants search
through the same unchanging display for hundreds of trials (repeated search), even though the participants have
a clear memory of the search display. In this article, we ask two important questions. First, why do participants
not use memory to help search the repeated display? Second, can context be introduced so that participants are
able to guide their attention to the relevant repeated items? Experiments 1–4 show that participants choose not
to use a memory strategy because, under these conditions, repeated memory search is actually less efficient than
repeated visual search, even though the latter task is in itself relatively inefficient. However, when the visual
search task is given context, so that only a subset of the items are ever pertinent, participants can learn to restrict
their attention to the relevant stimuli (Experiments 5 and 6)
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