People are able to ignore old (previewed) stimuli in order to prioritize the processing of newly appearing items--the preview benefit (D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 1997, "Visual marking: prioritizing selection for new objects by top-down attentional inhibition of old objects," Psychological Review, Vol. 104, pp. 90-122). According to the inhibitory visual marking account, this is achieved by the top-down and capacity-limited inhibition of old stimuli already in the field, which leads to a selection advantage for new items when they appear. In contrast, according to the abrupt luminance onset account (M. Donk & J. Theeuwes, 2001, "Visual marking beside the mark: prioritizing selection by abrupt onsets," Perception & Psychophysics, Vol. 63, pp. 891-900), new items capture attention automatically simply because they generate luminance onset signals. Here, we demonstrate that new items can be partially prioritized over old items even when they appear during an eyeblink and so have no unique luminance transients associated with their appearance. Overall, the findings suggest that both the inhibition of old items and attention capture by luminance changes contribute to time-based selection.

Public Significance StatementThis study suggests that engaging in a phone conversation does not prevent people from performing a cognitive task. People remain able to learn spatial layouts and filter out irrelevant information when conversing and performing a visual search task. However, having a conversation leads to a consistent delay in their responses. This delay has consequences for applied tasks where the ability to respond quickly is important (e.g. driving). AbstractPrevious research has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to impairments in a number of cognitive tasks. However, it is not yet known whether the act of conversation disrupts the underlying cognitive mechanisms (the Cognitive Disruption hypothesis) or leads to a delay in response due to a limit on central cognitive resources (the Cognitive Delay hypothesis). We investigated this here using two cognitive search tasks that investigate spatial learning and time-based selection: Contextual Cueing and Visual Marking. In Contextual Cueing, responses to repeated displays are faster than those to novel displays. In Visual Marking, participants prioritise attention to new information and deprioritise old, unimportant information (the 'Preview Benefit'). Experiments 1 to 3 investigated whether Contextual Cueing occurred while people were engaged in a phone conversation, whereas Experiments 4 to 6 investigated whether a Preview Benefit occurred, again while people were engaged in conversation. The results showed that having a conversation did not interfere with the mechanisms underlying spatial learning or time-based selection. However, in all experiments there was a significant increase in response times. The results are consistent with a Cognitive Delay account explaining the dual-task cost of having a phone conversation on concurrent cognitive tasks.

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