Uniqueness of abrupt visual onset in capturing attention

Jonides, John; Yantis, Steven

doi:10.3758/bf03208805

Cited by 896 publications

(1,012 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Derived from this physiological model is the proposal that attentional processing during the feedforward sweep is only affected by physical saliency of the stimulus, whereas stimulus relevance affects selection later, during the recurrent processing stage (Theeuwes, 2010;Van der Stigchel et al, 2009). 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).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2014

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“…Attention tends to be distracted by items that share some perceptual feature with the target (e.g. Jonides and Yantis, 1988). This kind of distraction effect can be thought of as a byproduct of the attempts of voluntary attention to use available visual features to home in on a subset of goal-relevant items in the environment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause.

Hunt

Mühlenen

Kingstone

2007

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Eye movements are often misdirected towards a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study explores that issue by examining the timecourse of eye movements and manual localization responses to targets in the presence of sudden onset distractors. The results demonstrate that for both response types, the proportion of trials on which responses are erroneously directed to sudden onsets reflects the quality of information about the visual display at a given point in time. We conclude that oculomotor capture is a specific instance of a more general attentional capture effect. Differences and similarities between the two types of capture can be explained by the critical idea that the quality of information about a visual display changes over time, and that different response systems tend to access this information at different moments in time.Keywords: Eye movements, visual search, attentional capture, oculomotor capture, voluntary and reflexive attention Localization by Hand and Eye 3 Selective attention is typically characterized as having two distinct subtypes: one subtype is variously named reflexive, exogenous, bottom-up and stimulus-driven attention, and the other subtype is referred to as voluntary, endogenous, top-down, and goal-directed attention. The bifurcation of selective attention into these subtypes has been supported by distinct function (e.g., Posner, 1980;Posner and Cohen, 1984;Lu and Dosher, 2000;Taylor and Klein, 1998) Selection by reflexive attention is driven by inherently attractive stimulus properties.Voluntary attention, in contrast, is often characterized as a goal-directed filter that uses expectations about the target's perceptual features to enhance certain visual channels over others in order to isolate the target from the rest of the display. An important question that is the subject of heated debate in the literature is how reflexive and voluntary attention function during search of the environment for a specific visual item, particularly in the face of a range of distracting events. The attentional capture paradigm is typically used as a method for measuring the relative contributions of reflexive and voluntary attention to visual search by measuring the efficiency of search for a given target when it is paired with specific kinds of distractors.Several studies have emphasized the role of stimulus properties in guiding attention.Some have argued that unique visual features in the environment are able to "capture" attention reflexively, without being relevant to task goals. For instance, a single red item among green ones will interfere with search for a specific shape, even when color is irrelevant to the task (Theeuwes, 1992). Theeuwes argues that this is because attention is initially allocated to the most perceptually s...

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“…Most forms of visual search represent the combined influences of bottom-up and top-down attentional control. Jonides and Yantis (1988) proposed that when the top-down information is minimized, not all forms of local salience capture attention. These authors reported that in a conjunction search for letters, the effect of display size on response time (RT) was eliminated when the target letter occurred as an onset singleton (i.e., one letter was presented at a blank location among other letters presented by the removal of lines from figure-8 characters).…”

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confidence: 99%

Age-Related Preservation of Top-Down Attentional Guidance During Visual Search.

Madden

Whiting

Cabeza

et al. 2004

Psychology and Aging

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Younger (19 -27 years of age) and older (60 -82 years of age) adults performed a letter search task in which a color singleton was either noninformative (baseline condition) or highly informative (guided condition) regarding target location. In the guided condition, both age groups exhibited a substantial decrease in response time (RT) to singleton targets, relative to the baseline condition, as well as an increase in RT to nonsingleton targets. The authors conclude that under conditions that equate the physical structure of individual displays, top-down attentional guidance can be at least as effective for older adults as for younger adults.

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Uniqueness of abrupt visual onset in capturing attention

Cited by 896 publications

References 17 publications

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

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

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause.

Age-Related Preservation of Top-Down Attentional Guidance During Visual Search.

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