Visual motion and attentional capture

Abstract

Previous work has shown that abrupt visual onsets capture attention. This occurs even with stimuli that are equiluminant with the background, which suggests that the appearance of a new perceptual object, not merely a change in luminance, captures attention. Three experiments are reported in which this work was extended by investigating the possible role of visual motion in attentional capture. Experiment 1 revealed that motion can efficiently guide attention when it is perfectly informative about the location of a visual search target, but that it does not draw attention when it does not predict the target's position. This result was obtained with several forms of motion, including oscillation, looming, and nearby moving contours. To account for these and other results, we tested a new-object account of attentional capture in Experiment 2 by using a global/local paradigm. When motion segregated a local letter from its perceptual group, the local letter captured attention as indexed by an effect on latency of response to the task-relevant global configuration. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that the motion in Experiment 2 captured attention merely by increasing the salience of the moving object. We argue instead that when motion segregates a perceptual element from a perceptual group, a new perceptual object is created, and this event captures attention. Together, the results suggest that motion as such does not capture attention but that the appearance of a new perceptual object does.Motion, like many other visual features, is registered effortlessly by the human visual system. For example, discontinuities in motion can be detected in visual search without attentional scrutiny (McLeod, Driver, & Crisp, 1988;Nakayama & Silverman, 1986), just as salient discontinuities in color and orientation can be (see, e.g., Treisman & Gormican, 1988). These findings suggest that visual motion can be detected without attention; motion is therefore often categorized as one of the "building blocks" of early vision. This has contributed to the belief that attention is involuntarily captured by moving objects: A natural way to draw someone's attention is to wave one's arms, and William James listed "moving things" among the sensorial stimuli to which attention is drawn involuntarily (James, 1890(James, /1950). Yet although findings support the claim that motion can be detected effortlessly when it is the target of search, there currently exists no direct evidence about whether motion captures attention.The argument that motion captures attention runs as follows: (1) Attributes that can be detected without attentional scrutiny (i.e., attributes that "pop out" of a disThis research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant ROI-MH43924 to Steven Yantis. Portions of this research were reported at the 1992 meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Boston and at the 1992 meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Bill Bacon, Howard Egeth, and Brad Gibson provided valuable suggestions concerning the research....

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