The effect of visualization on visual search performance: Does visualization trump vision?

Striking results recently demonstrated that visualising search for a target can facilitate visual search for that target on subsequent trials [Reinhart et al., 2015]. This visualisation benefit was even greater than the benefit of actually repeating search for the target. We registered a close replication and generalisation of the original experiment. Our results show clear benefits of repeatedly searching for the same target, but we found no benefit associated with visualisation. The difficulty of the search task and the ability to monitor compliance with instructions to visualise are both possible explanations for the failure to replicate, and both should be carefully considered in future research exploring this interesting phenomenon.