Oculomotor capture by surprising onsets

Godijn, Richard; Kramer, Arthur F.

doi:10.1080/13506280701437295

Cited by 19 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This paradigm was adapted by Godjin and Kramer (2008) to demonstrate oculomotor capture from the first appearance of an abrupt onset distractor. An unexpected stimulus cannot be used as any form of task-relevant signal and therefore would seem irrelevant to any top-down attentional setting.…”

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confidence: 99%

Entirely irrelevant distractors can capture and captivate attention

Forster

Lavie

2011

Psychon Bull Rev

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The question of whether a stimulus onset may capture attention when it is entirely irrelevant to the task and even in the absence of any attentional settings for abrupt onset or any dynamic changes has been highly controversial. In the present study, we designed a novel irrelevant capture task to address this question. Participants engaged in a continuous task making sequential forced choice (letter or digit) responses to each item in an alphanumeric matrix that remained on screen throughout many responses. This task therefore involved no attentional settings for onset or indeed any dynamic changes, yet the brief onset of an entirely irrelevant distractor (a cartoon picture) resulted in significant slowing of the two (Experiment 1) or three (Experiment 2) responses immediately following distractor appearance These findings provide a clear demonstration of attention being captured and captivated by a distractor that is entirely irrelevant to any attentional settings of the task.

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confidence: 99%

Entirely irrelevant distractors can capture and captivate attention

Forster

Lavie

2011

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…However, regardless of the orienting mechanism at play, the decrease in RTs and number of fixations on the post-critical trials relative to the critical trial demonstrates that stimulus novelty was critical to the effects observed in Experiment 2. These results demonstrate that oculomotor capture was modulated by the first presentation of an unannounced colour singleton, a result that has previously been demonstrated with onset transients (Godijn & Kramer, 2008) but not with colour stimuli.…”

Section: Eye-movement Analysessupporting

confidence: 59%

“…There is some evidence to suggest that unexpected stimuli can still capture attention and the gaze even when the target is pre-attentively available and able to compete for early selection. For instance, Godijn and Kramer (2008) found oculomotor capture by an unannounced new onset distractor when participants had the task to saccade to a colour singleton in a visual search paradigm. Consistent with the view that capture can be modulated by stimulus expectancies, the rate of oculomotor capture declined across repeated presentations of the onset distractor.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the effect on other aspects of the surprise response such as its temporal profile and signature RT increase were not explored. Furthermore, Godijn and Kramer (2008) used onsets as the surprising stimulus and there is evidence to suspect that the pattern of oculomotor capture associated with surprising stimuli may differ for different classes of stimuli (e.g. colour singletons vs. onsets; Wu & Remington, 2003).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attentional control: the role of task-expectations in determining attentional selection

Retell¹

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The human cognitive system is severely capacity limited. As such, only a select subset of visual input to the retina is fully processed by the cognitive system at any one point in time. To compensate, mechanisms of visual attention allow us to distribute these limited resources throughout the visual field according to properties of the visual input and our goals and intentions. Establishing the exact criteria by which visual input is selected to undergo further processing is central to understanding the processes that determine visual selection; processes that ultimately contribute to our conscious experience of the world. In this thesis, I focus on stimulus novelty and the role that task-expectancies play in determining visual selection. It is well documented that that which is new and unexpected often appears to standout in the environment and can attract visual attention (Horstmann, 2005; Meyer, Niepel, Rudolph & Schűtzwohl, 1991;Ranganath & Rainer, 2003;Yantis & Jonides 1990). However, the conditions under which this is the case and the mechanism by which we come to be sensitive to novel stimuli require some elucidation.Here I present 3 empirical chapters that explore the conditions under which novel and unexpected stimuli attract visual attention. In Chapter 2, I investigated whether attentional capture by unexpected stimuli reflects a form of stimulus driven capture and occurs contrary to the immediate goals on an observer. Across a series of experiments I found that an infrequent (~3-6% of trials) and irrelevant motion cue captured attention when observers had an active set for a specific target color.Critically, this effect was not observed when the same motion stimulus was presented frequently. Thus, task goals appear to modulate capture by stimuli that broadly conform to contextual expectations, while stimuli that violate these expectations appear to guide visual attention involuntarily.In chapter 3, I examined what it means for a stimulus to be 'unexpected'. The first presentation of an unexpected stimulus during visual search has been associated with large RT cost. In chapter 3, I independently varied prior exposure to an unexpected and irrelevant motion distractor and explicit knowledge of its occurrence to assess the contributions of each of these factors in determining the unexpectedness of the stimulus. Neither prior exposure, nor knowledge of occurrence served to attenuate the response to the unexpected motion distractor.ii These results suggest that the task expectations, which deviant stimuli are evaluated against, are highly context specific and derived from a process of implicit learning about stimulus relevance, and are a not shaped by explicit top-down knowledge about the likelihood of occurrence.In Chapter 4, I examined the time-course of attention shifts to unexpected stimuli. Previous authors (e.g., Horstmann, 2005;2006) have made the claim that shifts of attention to unexpected stimuli are delayed relative to expected stimuli and that this may suggest a dedicated orienting sy...

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“…Studies examining the interplay between voluntary and involuntary saccades have found that an abrupt onset of an irrelevant visual stimulus causes a reliable distraction effect (Irwin, Colcombe, Kramer, & Hahn, 2000;Ludwig & Gilchrist, 2002;Schreij, Owens, & Theeuwes, 2008;Theeuwes, Kramer, Hahn, Irwin, & Zelinsky, 1999). On 20-50% of such trials distractors cause an involuntary saccade towards the distractor (Godijn & Theeuwes, 2002;Irwin et al, 2000;Ludwig & Gilchrist, 2002), although some habituation has also been observed (Godijn & Kramer, 2008). Motion and motion onset has also been shown to be a potent capturer of attention in object detection paradigms (Abrams & Christ, 2003;Al-Aidroos, Guo, & Pratt, 2010;Franconeri & Simons, 2005;Guo, Abrams, Moscovitch, & Pratt, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye movement suppression interferes with construction of object-centered spatial reference frames in working memory

Wallentin

Kristensen

Olsen

et al. 2011

Brain and Cognition

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a b s t r a c t The brain's frontal eye fields (FEF), responsible for eye movement control, are known to be involved in spatial working memory (WM).In a previous fMRI experiment (Wallentin, Roepstorff & Burgess, Neuropsychologia, 2008) it was found that FEF activation was primarily related to the formation of an object-centered, rather than egocentric, spatial reference frame. In this behavioral experiment we wanted to demonstrate a causal relationship between eye movement control and manipulation of spatial reference frames. Sixty-two participants recalled either spatial (''Was X in front of Y?'') or non-spatial (''Was X darker than Y?'') relations in a previously shown image containing two to four objects, each with an intrinsic orientation and unique luminance. During half of all recall trials a moving visual stimulus was presented, which participants had to ignore, thus suppressing eye movement. Response times were significantly slower for spatial relations with distraction while there was no effect on non-spatial relations. There was no effect on accuracy, i.e. WM maintenance. This is consistent with the hypothesis that in spatial representations the FEFs are involved in WM content manipulation, such as establishing an object-centered spatial frame of reference.

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Oculomotor capture by surprising onsets

Cited by 19 publications

References 24 publications

Entirely irrelevant distractors can capture and captivate attention

Entirely irrelevant distractors can capture and captivate attention

Attentional control: the role of task-expectations in determining attentional selection

Eye movement suppression interferes with construction of object-centered spatial reference frames in working memory

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