Top-down contingencies in peripheral cuing: The roles of color and location.

Numerous studies that have investigated visual selective attention have demonstrated that a salient but taskirrelevant stimulus can involuntarily capture a participant's attention. Over the years, a lively debate has erupted concerning the impact of contingent top-down control settings on such stimulus-driven attentional capture. In the research reported here, we investigated whether top-down sets would also affect participants' performance in a multisensory task setting. A nonspatial compatibility task was used, in which the target and the distractor were always presented sequentially from the same spatial location. We manipulated targetdistractor similarity by varying the visual and tactile features of the stimuli. Participants always responded to the visual target features (color); the tactile features were incorporated into the participants' top-down set only when the experimental context allowed for the tactile feature to be used in order to discriminate the target from the distractor. Larger compatibility effects after bimodal distractors were observed only when the participants were searching for a bimodal target and when tactile information was useful. Taken together, these results provide the first demonstration of nonspatial contingent crossmodal capture.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 75%

supporting

confidence: 49%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Multisensory top-down sets: Evidence for contingent crossmodal capture

Mast

Frings

Spence

2015

“…The average RTs were around or above 800 ms, longer than in any of the current conditions, and yet robust cuing effects were still found in all three experiments in that study. 4 One may argue that the attentional capture effect by onset could be due to color similarity (i.e., white) between the cue and the target (Ansorge & Heumann, 2003). The onset cue shares the same color as the onset target (white), but not the color target (red); therefore, it is expected to have a larger capture effect with an onset target than with a color target if color similarity plays a role.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing attention is not that simple: Different mechanisms for stimulus-driven and contingent capture

Liao

Yeh

2013

Attentional orienting can be involuntarily directed to task-irrelevant stimuli, but it remains unsolved whether such attentional capture is contingent on top-down settings or could be purely stimulus-driven. We propose that attentional capture depends on the stimulus property because transient and static features are processed differently; thus, they might be modulated differently by top-down controls. To test this hybrid account, we adopted a spatial cuing paradigm in which a noninformative onset or color cue preceded an onset or color target with various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Results showed that the onset cue captured attention regardless of target type at short-but not long-SOAs. In contrast, the color cue captured attention at short and long SOAs, but only with a color target. The overall pattern of results corroborates our hypothesis, suggesting that different mechanisms are at work for stimulus-driven capture (by onset) and contingent capture (by color). Stimulus-driven capture elicits reflexive involuntary orienting, and contingent capture elicits voluntary feature-based enhancement.

“…Much research has revealed an interaction between topdown settings and bottom-up signals on the control of attention (e.g., Anderson & Folk, 2010;Ansorge & Heumann, 2003;Folk & Remington, 1998Folk et al, 1992;Folk et al, 1994;Gibson & Kelsey, 1998; for reviews, see Burnham, 2007;Theeuwes, 2010). But according to the attentional disengagement account, all salient stimuli capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner.…”

Section: Response Time Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using response time distributions to examine top-down influences on attentional capture

Burnham

2012

Three experiments examined contingent attentional capture, which is the finding that cuing effects are larger when cues are perceptually similar to a target than when they are dissimilar to the target. This study also analyzed response times (RTs) in terms of the underlying distributions for valid cues and invalid cues. Specifically, an ex-Gaussian analysis and a vincentile analysis examined the influence of top-down attentional control settings on the shift and skew of RT distributions and how the shift and the skew contributed to the cuing effects in the mean RTs. The results showed that cue/ target similarity influenced the size of cuing effects. The RT distribution analyses showed that the cuing effects reflected only a shifting effect, not a skewing effect, in the RT distribution between valid cues and invalid cues. That is, top-down attentional control moderated the cuing effects in the mean RTs through distribution shifting, not distribution skewing. The results support the contingent orienting hypothesis (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18, 1030-1044, 1992) over the attentional disengagement account (Theeuwes, Atchley, & Kramer, 2000) as an explanation for when top-down attentional settings influence the selection of salient stimuli.Keywords Attentional capture . Attentional control . Response time distributionHow and when do top-down settings and bottom-up signals moderate the allocation of attention toward salient items? Some propose that salient items receive priority and are selected in a stimulus-driven manner (e.g., Theeuwes, 1992Theeuwes, , 1994Theeuwes, , 2010Yantis, 1993Yantis, , 2000Yantis & Egeth, 1999). Others propose that salient items are selected only if they are relevant to current goals (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992;Folk, Remington, & Wright, 1994). Although top-down modulation of attention is well-established, the issue of how and when this modulation occurs is contested. Part of the issue may be the reliance on measures of central tendency of behavioral responses-namely, mean response times (M RT )-to infer when top-down modulation occurs. Results of studies using differences in M RT (or lack thereof) between conditions do not unambiguously support one side of the debate. This study went beyond using measures of central tendency by examining top-down modulation of the shift and skew of RT distributions in attentional capture tasks. Identifying how top-down control influences RT distributions provided insight as to when top-down control modulates the selection of salient stimuli.Evidence that salient items are selected only if they are featurally relevant comes from Folk et al. (1992), in which a color cue or onset cue appeared 150 ms prior to a target that was an onset singleton for some subjects and a color singleton for others. Folk et al. (1992) hypothesized that subjects would enter the target-defining feature into an attentional set that would moderate shifting attention toward the cues. Specifi...