The role of top‐down spatial attention in contingent attentional capture

Abstract

It is well known that attentional capture by an irrelevant salient item is contingent on top-down feature selection, but whether attentional capture may be modulated by top-down spatial attention remains unclear. Here, we combined behavioral and ERP measurements to investigate the contribution of top-down spatial attention to attentional capture under modified spatial cueing paradigms. Each target stimulus was preceded by a peripheral circular cue array containing a spatially uninformative color singleton cue. We varied target sets but kept the cue array unchanged among different experimental conditions. When participants' task was to search for a colored letter in the target array that shared the same peripheral locations with the cue array, attentional capture by the peripheral color cue was reflected by both a behavioral spatial cueing effect and a cue-elicited N2pc component. When target arrays were presented more centrally, both the behavioral and N2pc effects were attenuated but still significant. The attenuated cue-elicited N2pc was found even when participants focused their attention on the fixed central location to identify a colored letter among an RSVP letter stream. By contrast, when participants were asked to identify an outlined or larger target, neither the behavioral spatial cueing effect nor the cue-elicited N2pc was observed, regardless of whether the target and cue arrays shared same locations or not. These results add to the evidence that attentional capture by salient stimuli is contingent upon feature-based task sets, and further indicate that top-down spatial attention is important but may not be necessary for contingent attentional capture.

Attentional capture by a color singleton is stronger at spatially relevant than irrelevant locations: Evidence from an ERP study

“…Though our study (Huang et al, 2016) provided electrophysiological evidence that top-down spatial attention could modulate contingent attentional capture, the underlying mechanism is still not clear. One possibility is that the modulation effect was caused by spatial relevance of cues.…”

“…Our recent ERP study (Huang, Su, Zhen, & Qu, 2016) further provided the first electrophysiological evidence for the modulation of top-down spatial attention on contingent attentional capture. We utilized variants of spatial cueing paradigms and compared the spatial cueing effects and cue-elicited N2pcs under different manipulations of top-down spatial attention.…”

“…One confounding factor would come from task difficulty. Since attentional capture effects were compared between central and peripheral tasks in our previous study (Huang et al, 2016), it is possible that different magnitudes of attentional capture were due to unmatched task difficulties (Lavie, 1995(Lavie, , 2005. A second confounding factor would be spread of attentional window.…”

“…The purpose of the current study was to confirm the inequivalence of attentional capture by a color singleton across attended and unattended locations and to further investigate the underlying mechanism. In two experiments, we modified the spatial cueing paradigm used in our previous study (Huang et al, 2016) to control separate confounding factors. In Experiment 1, cue arrays and target arrays were both presented at peripheral locations with a same eccentricity.…”

Perceptual learning induces active suppression of physically nonsalient shapes

“…Such capture of attention is often called contingent attentional capture (Folk et al, ), and the supporting evidence usually comes from studies using a spatial cueing paradigm or a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm in which irrelevant‐but‐salient cues are presented about 200 ms before the target. For example, numerous behavioral and ERP studies using a spatial cueing paradigm (Eimer & Kiss, ; Folk et al, ; Folk, Remington, & Wright, ; Huang, Su, Zhen, & Qu, ; Kiss & Eimer, ; Lien, Ruthruff, & Cornett, ) or an RSVP paradigm (Folk, Leber, & Egeth, , ; Huang et al, ; Leblanc, Prime, & Jolicoeur, ; Moore & Weissman, ; Serences et al, ) found that irrelevant color singleton cues attracted attention (reflected by delaying target detection and/or eliciting an involuntary N2pc component) when the target was also defined by color. According to goal‐driven theories, the finding in the additional singleton paradigm that a color singleton distractor captured attention was probably due to the use of an attentional set that favors any type of feature singleton rather than a specific feature value (called singleton‐detection mode; Bacon & Egeth, ).…”