Attentional control during visual search: The effect of irrelevant singletons.

Abstract

Four experiments investigated whether a highly salient color singleton can be ignored during serial search. Observers searched for a target letter among nontarget letters and were instructed to ignore an irrelevant, highly salient color singleton that was either compatible or incompatible with the response to the target letter. The results indicate that it was possible to prevent attentional capture by the irrelevant singleton only when both the target and the distractor color were known. When either the color of the target or the color of the to-be-ignored singleton were varied over trials, the irrelevant singleton captured attention. The ability to selectively falter singleton distractors during serial search depends on the presence of an attentional set for a specific feature value of both target and distractor. In the absence of a consistently predictable feature value of both target and distractor, top-down control is not possible. Among the most fundamental issues of visual attention research is the extent to which visual selection is controlled by the properties of the image or by the intentions, goals, and beliefs of the observer (for recent reviews, see Egeth &

Attentional capture is contingent on the interaction between task demand and stimulus salience

“…For instance, regarding the reflexive attention aspect: In Rauschenberger's (2003b) study, when participants were set for new object onset, large luminance changes might be considered to be highly salient, so they captured attention, whereas small luminance changes might be considered to be relatively low salient, so they failed to capture attention. Regarding the voluntary attention aspect, in Theeuwes and Burger's (1998) study, the congruency effect associated with a salient but to-be-ignored color distractor was eliminated only when participants were fully informed about the colors of the target and the distractor. Recent progress in physiological studies may shed light on the neural mechanism.…”

“…Although there has been relatively little direct evidence supporting attentional capture by salient static stimuli, some recent studies have demonstrated capture effects by using indirect methods that reasonably rule out possible top-down influences (Horstmann, 2002;Theeuwes & Burger, 1998;Theeuwes & Godijn, 2002). For instance, Theeuwes, Atchley, and Kramer (2000) found that a color singleton distractor indeed interfered with the search for a shape singleton target when the distractor preceded the target by 100 msec or less, suggesting that attention might be initially drawn to the distractor position and then swiftly disengaged.…”

Attention to Features Precedes Attention to Locations in Visual Search: Evidence from Electromagnetic Brain Responses in Humans

“…A number of behavioral and electrophysiological findings in the literature are in line with this conclusion. For example, it has been shown that items at nontarget locations attract attention in visual search to the extent that they bear features of the searched-for set (Kim and Cave, 1995;Shui-I and Sperling, 1996;Theeuwes and Burger, 1998;Woodman and Luck, 1999;Arnott et al, 2001;Theeuwes et al, 2001). In particular, Folk and colleagues (Folk et al, 1992(Folk et al, , 1994(Folk et al, , 2002Folk and Remington, 1998) and others (Yantis and Egeth, 1999) have shown that distractors matching the attentional set are highly effective at capturing attention when attention is not already strongly focused on a different location.…”

Abrupt onsets capture attention independent of top-down control settings II: Additivity is no evidence for filtering

“…To further support the claim that both cues captured attention, we investigated whether cued distractor identities interfered with responses to the target, following the identity intrusion method introduced by Theeuwes (1996; see also Theeuwes & Burger, 1998). If attention is shifted to the location of the cue, the assumption is that the identity of the object at that position will be preferentially processed (e.g., Kramer & Jacobson, 1991).…”