Attentional Capture for Simple Shapes from Gamified Visual Search Training

Abstract

Attentional capture is a phenomenon in which rewarded stimuli become more salient, automatically drawing attention when encountered later. Attentional capture can be reliably produced in the laboratory, usually by paying participants money for finding certain targets in a visual search task (Anderson, Laurent, & Yantis, 2011). We have recently shown that attentional capture can also be produced by presenting tasks in a videogame-like format, with points and sound effects serving as the rewards in place of money (Miranda & Palmer, 2014). In the current study, we apply gamified attentional capture training to the automatic processing of target shapes rather than target colors. Participants were rewarded for locating certain shapes in a training phase and then in a later test phase (during which shape was irrelevant to the task) participants were significantly slower to identify oddball color targets if a previously rewarded shape was present as a distractor. This demonstrates that participants’ visual systems learned to prioritize processing of rewarded shapes and automatically attend to them even when they were irrelevant to the task. Implications of this work for training of socially critical visual search tasks is discussed.