White bear everywhere: Exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

Lahav, Aya; Makovski, Tal; Tsal, Yehoshua

doi:10.3758/s13414-012-0275-2

Cited by 25 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Conceivably, knowing about the location or defining feature(s) of a distracting item might help ignore it; though, paradoxically, attention might also be especially drawn to this item, increasing its distracting effect. The latter effect has actually been reported in the literature (Huffman, Rajsic, & Pratt, 2017 ; Lahav, Makovski, & Tsal, 2012 ; Tsal & Makovski, 2006 ) and termed ‘attentional white-bear’ phenomenon (AWB; Tsal and colleagues) or ‘ironic capture’ (Huffman and colleagues). Tsal and colleagues argued that the first item selected is likely to be the distractor, in part because the very instruction to ignore the distractor will represent it, as a kind of ‘template’, in visual working memory (vWM), biasing the allocation of attention towards a distractor appearing in the display—in the same way as trying not to think about a white bear makes one focus on its very mental image.…”

Section: Attentional White Bear? Predicting the Irrelevant Itemmentioning

confidence: 70%

Distract yourself: prediction of salient distractors by own actions and external cues

Havlíček

Müller

Wykowska

2018

Psychological Research

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Distracting sensory events can capture attention, interfering with the performance of the task at hand. We asked: is our attention captured by such events if we cause them ourselves? To examine this, we employed a visual search task with an additional salient singleton distractor, where the distractor was predictable either by the participant’s own (motor) action or by an endogenous cue; accordingly, the task was designed to isolate the influence of motor and non-motor predictive processes. We found both types of prediction, cue- and action-based, to attenuate the interference of the distractor—which is at odds with the “attentional white bear” hypothesis, which states that prediction of distracting stimuli mandatorily directs attention towards them. Further, there was no difference between the two types of prediction. We suggest this pattern of results may be better explained by theories postulating general predictive mechanisms, such as the framework of predictive processing, as compared to accounts proposing a special role of action–effect prediction, such as theories based on optimal motor control. However, rather than permitting a definitive decision between competing theories, our study highlights a number of open questions, to be answered by these theories, with regard to how exogenous attention is influenced by predictions deriving from the environment versus our own actions.

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Section: Attentional White Bear? Predicting the Irrelevant Itemmentioning

confidence: 70%

Distract yourself: prediction of salient distractors by own actions and external cues

Havlíček

Müller

Wykowska

2018

Psychological Research

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“…Observing attentional capture by reward-signaling stimuli after being instructed to ignore these stimuli bears some resemblance to the attentional white bear phenomenon (Lahav, Makovski, & Tsal, 2012 ; Tsal & Makovski, 2006 ). According to this notion, participants tend to attend distractors they are instructed to ignore.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Don’t let it distract you: how information about the availability of reward affects attentional selection

Failing

Theeuwes

2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Previous research has shown that attentional selection is affected by reward contingencies: previously selected and rewarded stimuli continue to capture attention even if the reward contingencies are no longer in place. In the current study, we investigated whether attentional selection also is affected by stimuli that merely signal the magnitude of reward available on a given trial but, crucially, have never had instrumental value. In a series of experiments, we show that a stimulus signaling high reward availability captures attention even when that stimulus is and was never physically salient or part of the task set, and selecting it is harmful for obtaining reward. Our results suggest that irrelevant reward-signaling stimuli capture attention, because participants have learned about the relationship between the stimulus and reward. Importantly, we only observed learning after initial attentional prioritization of the reward signaling stimulus. We conclude that nonsalient, task-irrelevant but reward-signaling stimuli can affect attentional selection above and beyond top-down or bottom-up attentional control, however, only after such stimuli were initially prioritized for selection.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13414-017-1376-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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“…Previous studies have used a few different methods to examine whether observers can intentionally ignore known distractor locations. In one study, participants completed a flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974) in which the task-irrelevant flankers appeared at the same location trial-by-trial (Lahav, Makovski, & Tsal, 2012;Tsal & Makovski, 2006). On a subset of trials, two dots appeared, one at a flanker's location and one at a neutral location, and participants had to report which of the two dots appeared first.…”

Section: Distractor Inhibitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ironic capture: top-down expectations exacerbate distraction in visual search

Huffman

Rajsic

Pratt

2017

Psychological Research

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Ironic processing refers to the phenomenon where attempting to resist doing something results in a person doing that very thing. Here, we report three experiments investigating the role of ironic processing in visual search. In Experiment 1, we informed observers that they could predict the location of a salient color singleton in a visual search task and found that response times were slower in that condition than in a condition where the singleton's location was random. Experiment 2 used the same experimental design but did not inform participants of the color singleton's behavior. Experiment 3 showed that the cost in the predictable condition was not due to dual task costs or block order effects and participants attempting to use the strategy showed a larger cost in the predictable condition than those who abandoned using that location foreknowledge. In this case, responses in the predictable color singleton condition were equivalent with the random color singleton condition. This suggests that having more knowledge about an upcoming, salient distractor ironically increases its interfering influence on performance.

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White bear everywhere: Exploring the boundaries of the attentional white bear phenomenon

Cited by 25 publications

References 30 publications

Distract yourself: prediction of salient distractors by own actions and external cues

Distract yourself: prediction of salient distractors by own actions and external cues

Don’t let it distract you: how information about the availability of reward affects attentional selection

Ironic capture: top-down expectations exacerbate distraction in visual search

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