Involuntary Attentional Capture is Determined by Task Set: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Eimer, Martin; Kiss, Mónika

doi:10.1162/jocn.2008.20099

Cited by 319 publications

(364 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…As expected, behavioral spatial cuing effects indicative of attentional capture were observed on trials where target-color cues were presented. These cues also triggered pronounced N2pc components, confirming findings from previous ERP studies (Eimer & Kiss, 2008;Eimer et al, 2009;Lien et al, 2008) and emphasizing the fact that target-color cues captured attention. The critical question was whether similar behavioral and electrophysiological effects would also be observed for irrelevant-color cues.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…Under these conditions, inverted behavioral spatial cuing effects indicative of location-specific inhibition were reliably observed for irrelevant-color singleton cues; there was no evidence for an N2pc in response to these cues, suggesting that attentional capture was successfully prevented on virtually all trials. In contrast, results similar to those found in Experiment 2 (a small and delayed N2pc to irrelevant-color singleton cues in the absence of behavioral spatial cuing effects) were observed in another ERP experiment (Eimer & Kiss, 2008, Experiment 1) where observers searched for onset targets. These observations suggest that the impact of feature-specific top-down task sets on attentional selectivity may be generally more pronounced when visual search targets are nonsingletons.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…To gain more detailed insights into the time course of attentional capture and its modulation by top-down task set, a number of recent studies have measured an event-related brain potential (ERP) component as an electrophysiological marker of capture (e.g., Eimer & Kiss, 2008;Eimer et al, 2009;Hickey, McDonald, & Theeuwes, 2006;Lien, Ruthruff, Goodin, & Remington, 2008). The N2pc component, an enhanced negativity over posterior scalp electrodes contralateral to the side of an attended stimulus elicited between 180 and 300 msec after the onset of a visual search array, is assumed to reflect the attentional selection of candidate target items among distractors in visual search tasks (Luck & Hillyard, 1994a, 1994b; see also Eimer, 1996;Girelli & Luck, 1997;Mazza, Turatto, Umiltà, & Eimer, 2007;Woodman & Luck, 1999).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Top-down search strategies determine attentional capture in visual search: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Eimer

Kiss

2010

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

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The relative roles of endogenous (voluntary and goaldirected) attention and exogenous (involuntary and stimulus-driven) attention in visual search are still under dispute. There is considerable evidence that perceptually salient but task-irrelevant visual events can capture attention independently of current task sets. For example, reaction times (RTs) to shape singleton targets presented among nontarget shapes (e.g., a diamond target among circle distractors) are delayed when a salient but taskirrelevant color singleton is present in the visual search array, relative to trials without a color distractor (e.g., Theeuwes, 1991). This suggests that color singletons capture attention due to their bottom-up salience, and irrespective of current task set. However, other studies (e.g., Folk & Remington, 1998;Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992;Folk, Remington, & Wright, 1994) have suggested that the ability of salient visual events to capture attention is determined by current top-down task sets. In these studies, spatially nonpredictive singleton cues preceded visual search displays, and the presence or absence of attentional capture was inferred from the pattern of spatial cuing effects. Faster RTs in response to visual search targets at cued rather than uncued locations were found only when cue features matched the current task set (e.g., for color singleton cues in blocks where targets were also color singletons), but not when cue features were task irrelevant. These findings support the contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis (Folk et al., 1992), which postulates that attentional capture will be triggered by salient visual stimuli only when these possess attributes that are currently task relevant.To resolve the dispute between the salience-based bottom-up account of attentional capture advocated by Theeuwes (1991Theeuwes ( , 1992 and the hypothesis that capture is mediated by top-down task set (Folk et al., 1992), Bacon and Egeth (1994) have suggested that attentional capture can be determined either by bottom-up salience or by top-down control, depending on which generalized search strategy is used in a given task context. In search tasks where target items are feature singletons, participants may choose to adopt a singleton detection mode, where they search for any feature discontinuity irrespective of its value. When this search mode is adopted, salient but task-irrelevant visual singletons will capture attention, as observed by Theeuwes (1991). However, this singleton search mode is not available in search tasks where targets are not singletons. Here, participants have to adopt a more finely tuned feature search mode, where they search for specific target-defining features or dimensions. When feature search is used, singletons that do not possess targetdefining features will not capture attention, in line with the observations of Folk et al. (1992). Bacon and Egeth demonstrated that RT costs associated with a salient but task-irrelevant color singleton distractor emerge only when shape targets are themselv...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Top-down search strategies determine attentional capture in visual search: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Eimer

Kiss

2010

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

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“…The amplitude of this PCN wave typically is interpreted as indicating the amount of attentional-resource allocation required for a task, and its latency has been regarded as marking the transition from preattentive sensory coding to the stage of focal-attentional selection (18,19). Recently, the timing of the PCN has been shown to depend on a variety of factors, including bottom-up stimulus intensity (20) and saliency (21,22) as well as top-down featural (23) and dimensional set (24), illustrating the flexibility of human visuocortical processing as a function of external (stimulus) and internal (system) settings.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How the speed of motor-response decisions, but not focal-attentional selection, differs as a function of task set and target prevalence

Töllner

Rangelov

Müller

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Over the last decades, the visual-search paradigm has provided a powerful test bed for competing theories of visual selective attention. However, the information required to decide upon the correct motor response differs fundamentally across experimental studies, being based, for example, on the presence, spatial location, or identity of the target item. This variability raises the question as to whether estimates of the time taken for (i) focalattentional selection, (ii) deciding on the motor response, and (iii) response execution generalize across search studies or are specific to the demands of a particular task set. To examine this issue, we presented physically identical stimulus material in four different search task conditions, requiring target localization, detection, discrimination, or compound responses, and combined mental chronometry with two specific electroencephalographic brain responses that are directly linkable to either preattentive or postselective levels of visual processing. Behaviorally, reactions were fastest for localization, slowest for compound responses, and of intermediate speed for detection and discrimination responses. At the electroencephalographic level, this effect of task type manifested in the timing of the stimulus-and response-locked lateralized readiness potential (indexing motor-response decisions), but not posterior contralateral negativity (indexing focal-attentional selection), component. This result demonstrates that only the stage of preattentive visual coding generalizes across task settings, whereas processes that follow focal target selection are dependent on the nature of the task. Consequently, this task set-specific pattern has fundamental implications for all types of experimental paradigms, within and beyond visual search, that require humans to generate motor responses on the basis of external sensory stimulation.decision making | stimulus-response translation | visual attention D eciding upon the appropriate motor (e.g., vocal, manual) response is one of the most ubiquitous tasks posed by everyday life. In most instances, such decisions are determined by relevant or salient sensory (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile) information extracted from the multitude of stimuli present in the external world by selective-attention mechanisms (1, 2). Over the last century, a remarkable variety of experimental paradigms (e.g., visual search, dual task, task switching) has been developed to approximate such decision-making processes in the laboratory. One prominent example, which has provided a powerful test bed for competing theories of visual selective attention (3-5), is visual search. In the standard visual-search paradigm, humans or other primates are presented with a display that can contain a target item among a variable number of distractor items, with reaction times (RT) to the target and response accuracy providing the critical performance measures. Interestingly, however, when study designs are compared in terms of their underlying task settings [i.e., stimul...

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“…An argument put forward to favour this proposal is the observation that irrelevant distracters with a unique feature capture attention (Jonides and Yantis, 1988) or gaze (Theeuwes et al, 1999;van Zoest et al, 2004) and elicit electrophysiological responses preceding activity related to processing of the relevant target (Hickey et al, 2006). In contrast, other studies using similar paradigms found that stimulus relevance is a crucial determinant of attentional capture and may affect early cortical processing of visual stimuli (Eimer and Kiss, 2008;Leblanc et al, 2008;Ptak et al, 2011;Yantis and Egeth, 1999). For instance, the capture of attention by goal-relevant features modulates event-related potentials (ERPs) approximately 180 ms after stimulus onset (Leblanc et al, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Task relevance effects in electrophysiological brain activity: Early, but not first

2014

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A current controversy surrounds the question whether high-level features of a stimulus such as its relevance to the current task may affect early attentional processes. According to one view abruptly appearing stimuli gain priority during an initial feedforward processing stage and therefore capture attention even if they are irrelevant to the task. Alternatively, only stimuli that share a relevant property with the target may capture attention of the observer. Here, we used high-density EEG to test whether task relevance may modulate early feedforward brain activity, or whether it only becomes effective once the physical characteristics of the stimulus have been processed. We manipulated task relevance and visual saliency of distracters presented left or right of an upcoming central target. We found that only the relevance of distracters had an effect on manual reaction times to the target. However, the analysis of electrocortical activity revealed three discrete processing stages during which pure effects of distracter saliency (~80-160 ms), followed by an interaction between saliency and relevance (~130-240 ms) and finally pure effects of relevance (~230-370 ms) were observed. Electrical sources of early saliency effects and later relevance effects were localized in the posterior parietal cortex, predominantly over the right hemisphere. These findings support the view that during the initial feedforward stage only physical (bottom-up) factors determine cortical responses to visual stimuli, while top-down effects interfere at later processing stages.

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Involuntary Attentional Capture is Determined by Task Set: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Cited by 319 publications

References 20 publications

Top-down search strategies determine attentional capture in visual search: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Top-down search strategies determine attentional capture in visual search: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

How the speed of motor-response decisions, but not focal-attentional selection, differs as a function of task set and target prevalence

Task relevance effects in electrophysiological brain activity: Early, but not first

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