Target uncertainty does not lead to more distraction by singletons: Intertrial priming does

Abstract

In our everyday lives, we are presented with a wide variety of visual stimuli. For adaptive behavior, it is important to select both objects relevant to our goals and objects that might not be directly relevant but have an intrinsic importance. A key discussion in attention research is the interaction between these goals and the intrinsic qualities of objects in the visual field. The discussion revolves around the concept of attentional capture, defined as the involuntarily drawing of attention.According to the bottom-up view, objects carrying a unique feature may automatically capture attention as a result of their relative salience (Theeuwes, 1991). These objects are often referred to as singletons, since they are unique on a certain dimension (Pashler, 1988). For instance, in Theeuwes's (1991) task, people searched for either a diamond among circles or a circle among diamonds. These display types were randomly mixed so that the participants would not know beforehand which shape to look for. Although the task was to look for the odd shape, reaction times (RTs) were about 150 msec longer when a differently colored singleton distractor was also present. Since the singleton was completely irrelevant to the task, Theeuwes (1991) concluded that it captured attention automatically.In a subsequent series of experiments, Theeuwes (1992) replicated his earlier findings, except that now, throughout a block, the target remained the same-that is, within one block, the target was always a diamond among circles, and within another block, it was always a circle among diamonds-while a singleton distractor could be present. The participants were still distracted by the singleton distractor, but now it had a slowing effect of only about 20 msec (as compared with the 150 msec found by Theeuwes, 1991).These findings appear to be difficult to explain from a pure bottom-up view. Note that the stimuli were exactly the same in both studies, the only difference being that, in Theeuwes (1991), target types were mixed and, thus, the participants did not know beforehand what the target would be. Instead, Theeuwes's (1991Theeuwes's ( , 1992 findings suggest that attentional capture by the singleton is task dependent, since target preknowledge influences the distracting effect of the singleton. This seems more in accordance with a top-down view of attentional capture (see also Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992;Yantis & Egeth, 1999). Presumably, when the target is uncertain, participants adopt a less restrictive attentional set, to accommodate the differences in target appearance. This less restrictive attentional set then makes the participants more susceptible to singleton distractors. This notion of a more or less restrictive attentional set is in accordance with what Bacon and Egeth (1994) referred to as the difference between the feature search mode and the singleton detection mode of attention. Bacon and Egeth also found that an irrelevant singleton distractor interfered with search, but only if the target itself was also a singleton-...

Experience-dependent attentional tuning of distractor rejection

“…But, like the filtering hypothesis, it is not clear why disengagement would become faster with experience, unless one proposes that experience with the distractor itself affects attentional control and capture, which is precisely our view. Finally, there have been many demonstrations of priming in attentional capture (Lamy, Carmel, Egeth, & Leber, 2006;Olivers & Humphreys, 2003;Pinto, Olivers, & Theeuwes, 2005). We view our results as being largely consistent with this literature.…”

Effects of search mode and intertrial priming on singleton search

“…The absence of an interaction between distractor interference and target feature repetition appears to be directly at odds with recent findings by Pinto, Olivers, and Theeuwes (2005). Their study was similar to the present Experiment 1 but included only the fixed and mixed singleton conditions.…”

“…On the basis of the claim that performance in the fixed and the mixed singleton conditions became similar with respect to distractor interference after one repetition of the target feature, Pinto et al (2005) concluded that the same salience-based mechanism underlies the two conditions and that no feature-based guidance operates in search for a known singleton. However, in their study, RTs in the mixed singleton condition on repeated target feature trials remained substantially higher than those in the fixed singleton condition.…”

The role of spatial and nonspatial information in visual selection

“…It should be noted that the increased sensitivity due to priming that we observed in our experiments (and in, e.g., Maljkovic and Nakayama, 1994;Kristjansson et al, 2002;Pinto et al, 2005) is unlike the more the traditional response priming (e.g., Bertelson, 1965;Pashler & Baylis, 1991), in which the facilitation of performance is due to priming of the probable response. In those experiments, performance improves because priming allows the advanced preparation of the most likely response.…”