The Time Course of the Contingent Spatial Blink.

Attentional capture is the unintentional deployment of attention to a task-irrelevant but attentionally salient object. The contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis states that it occurs only if a distractor's property matches current top-down attentional control settings (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). Folk, Leber, and Egeth (2002) found that monitoring a central RSVP stream for a coloured target led to spatial attentional capture by a peripheral distractor that matched the target colour. Using a similar paradigm, we explored the time course of this spatial blink. Implications of this study for current accounts of the attentional capture phenomenon are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivationally significant stimuli show visual prior entry: Evidence for attentional capture.

Previous studies that have found attentional capture effects for stimuli of motivational significance do not directly measure initial attentional deployment, leaving it unclear to what extent these items produce attentional capture. Visual prior entry, as measured by temporal order judgments (TOJs), rests on the premise that allocated attention accelerates perception, that is, stimuli that receive attention first are perceived first; thus, this method is a sensitive and direct measure of the time course of initial attentional deployment. The authors demonstrate, using a novel TOJ paradigm without cues, that displays of faces and facial threat show visual prior entry effects, that is, these stimuli are prioritized by the perceptual–attentional system over other stimuli competing for awareness. This study provides direct evidence of the extent to which motivationally significant stimuli capture attention over other concurrently displayed items in the visual array. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of relational information in contingent capture.

On the contingent capture account, top-down attentional control settings restrict involuntary attentional capture to items that match the features of the search target. Attention capture is involuntary, but contingent on goals and intentions. The observation that only target-similar items can capture attention has usually been taken to show that the content of the attentional control settings consists of specific feature values. In contrast, the present study demonstrates that the top-down target template can include information about the relationship between the target and nontarget features (e.g., redder, darker, larger). Several spatial cuing experiments show that a singleton cue that is less similar to the target but that shares the same relational property that distinguishes targets from nontargets can capture attention to the same extent as cues that are similar to the target. Moreover, less similar cues can even capture attention more than cues that are identical to the target when they are relationally better than identical cues. The implications for current theories of attentional capture and attentional guidance are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional capture by emotional stimuli is modulated by semantic processing.

The attentional blink paradigm was used to examine whether emotional stimuli always capture attention. The processing requirement for emotional stimuli in a rapid sequential visual presentation stream was manipulated to investigate the circumstances under which emotional distractors capture attention, as reflected in an enhanced attentional blink effect. Emotional distractors did not cause more interference than neutral distractors on target identification when perceptual or phonological processing of stimuli was required, showing that emotional processing is not as automatic as previously hypothesized. Only when semantic processing of stimuli was required did emotional distractors capture more attention than neutral distractors and increase attentional blink magnitude. Combining the results from 5 experiments, the authors conclude that semantic processing can modulate the attentional capture effect of emotional stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory and visual capture during focused visual attention.

It is well known that auditory and visual onsets presented at a particular location can capture a person’s visual attention. However, the question of whether such attentional capture disappears when attention is focused endogenously beforehand has not yet been answered. Moreover, previous studies have not differentiated between capture by onsets presented at a nontarget (invalid) location and possible performance benefits occurring when the target location is (validly) cued. In this study, the authors modulated the degree of attentional focus by presenting endogenous cues with varying reliability and by displaying placeholders indicating the precise areas where the target stimuli could occur. By using not only valid and invalid exogenous cues but also neutral cues that provide temporal but no spatial information, they found performance benefits as well as costs when attention is not strongly focused. The benefits disappear when the attentional focus is increased. These results indicate that there is bottom-up capture of visual attention by irrelevant auditory and visual stimuli that cannot be suppressed by top-down attentional control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A static color discontinuity can capture spatial attention when the target is an abrupt-onset singleton.

C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston's (1992) contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis states that a salient visual feature will involuntarily capture attention only when the observer's attentional set includes similar features. In four experiments, when the target's relevant feature was its being an abruptly onset singleton, attentional capture occurred for a static discontinuity cue that was the boundary between a group of red Xs contiguously joined to a group of green Os within a single row. Such an attentional capture effect is novel and contrary to Folk et al.'s (1992) hypothesis, because the attentional set for the target should have included abrupt onset but not color discontinuity, which was the feature that captured attention. These capture effects were involuntary because they occurred even when the target never appeared in the same location as the cue, and color could not have been used as a cue to signal the appearance of the target array (cf. B. S. Gibson & E. M. Kelsey, 1998). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional capture by working memory contents.

There has been controversy on whether working memory (WM) contents automatically guide attention. The present study tried to replicate the effect of WM-based attentional capture using an adaption of Downing's (2000) paradigm, in which WM and attentional capture were combined. Subjects were presented with an attention display containing two objects, one of which could be precued by a matching item being held in WM. As measured by a probe discrimination task, the memory-matching object had a privileged status to capture attention regardless of the stimulus onset asynchronies between the memory cue and the attention display, even when there was absolutely no benefit for subjects to bias attention in favour of the memory match. These results suggest that WM contents guide attention in an involuntary manner. The implications of current findings for understanding of WM effects on visual selection are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contingent attentional capture: A reply to Yantis (1993).

The authors (1992) recently proposed that involuntary shifts of spatial attention, even those elicited by abrupt visual onsets, are contingent on variable internal control settings. S. Yantis (1993) argues that the results of J. Jonides and Yantis (1988) significantly challenge this hypothesis and that the paradigm of C. L. Folk et al (1992) is inappropriate for investigating stimulus-driven attentional capture. Yantis's concerns are addressed, and it is concluded that the contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis in fact provides a unified and parsimonious account of the data on attentional capture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contingent attentional capture by top-down control settings: Converging evidence from event-related potentials.

Theories of attentional control are divided over whether the capture of spatial attention depends primarily on stimulus salience or is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands. The authors addressed this issue using the N2-posterior- contralateral (N2pc) effect, a component of the event-related brain potential thought to reflect attentional allocation. They presented a cue display followed by a target display of 4 letters. Each display contained a green item and a red item. Some participants responded to the red letter and others to the green letter. Converging lines of evidence indicated that attention was captured by the cues with the same color as the target. First, these target-color cues produced a cuing validity effect on behavioral measures. Second, distractors appearing in the cued location produced larger compatibility effects. Third, the target-color cue produced a robust N2pc effect, similar in magnitude to the N2pc effect to the target itself. Furthermore, the target-color cue elicited a similar N2pc effect regardless of whether it competed with a simultaneous abrupt onset. The findings provide converging evidence for attentional capture contingent on top-down control settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

To look or not to look: An eye movement study of hypervigilance during change detection in high and low spider fearful students.

Previous eye movement studies of attentional bias in spider fear reported inconsistent results with respect to early attentional capture, suggesting that overt attentional capture only reliably occurs under specific circumstances. In addition, none of these studies explored covert attention. The present study examined attentional bias in spider phobia using a change detection paradigm that was expected to provide good conditions for documenting attentional capture. In contrast to our expectations, eye movement data showed that all participants' first fixations were fastest on general negative targets, whereas participants' first fixations on spider targets were slower in the spider fearful than in the nonfearful group. In addition, spider fearful participants made more nontarget fixations before fixating on a spider target than did nonfearful participants. Thus, we found that participants' overt attention was more quickly focused on general negative targets, whereas covert attentional processes enabled initial avoidance of fear-relevant (i.e. spider) stimuli. The present findings have important implications for research on attention and fear as they indicate that fearful individuals are not characterized by static attentional orienting toward threat but, under certain conditions, may avert attention from threat automatically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stimulus-driven attentional capture by a static discontinuity between perceptual groups.

After C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston (1992) proposed their contingent-orienting hypothesis, there has been an ongoing debate over whether purely stimulus-driven attentional capture can occur for visual events that are salient by virtue of a distinctive static property (as opposed to a dynamic property such as abrupt onset). The present study identified 3 methodological criteria for establishing that attentional capture is stimulus driven and not contingent on top-down attentional control settings. In 5 experiments, attentional capture occurred for a static discontinuity at the boundary between one group of homogeneous items (red Xs) abutted next to a group of homogeneous items that were featurally different (green Xs) within a single row. Experiment 1 intentionally violated one of the criteria for demonstrating stimulus-driven capture so as to establish that contingent attentional capture can occur for this novel type of static cue. In the remaining 4 experiments, even with all 3 criteria for stimulus-driven capture partially or completely satisfied, the static discontinuity captured attention. These attentional capture effects are the first to be obtained when all 3 criteria for establishing that they are purely stimulus driven have been satisfied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Task-irrelevant angry faces capture attention in visual search while modulated by resources.

We investigated the attentional capture effect of emotional faces under sufficient or restricted attentional conditions. In a modified visual search paradigm, three kinds of schematic faces (angry, happy, and neutral) served as stimuli. Participants were instructed to search for a target face indicated by a dot and to respond to the dot's position. In this design, the emotional content of the face is task-irrelevant and does not need to be attended. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that having an angry face as the target face elicited a faster response than did the neutral target face, and when the angry face is used as a distractor, the response to the target was delayed compared to the response with no such distractor. Experiment 2 included inverted faces to decrease emotional content; results showed that inversion of the faces reduced the effect of angry faces on the search performance. When attention was cued to a specific area in Experiment 3, the effect of angry faces outside of the cued area became weaker. In conclusion, the results indicate that a task-irrelevant angry face can capture attention beyond top-down control, but this effect is modulated by the availability of attentional resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characteristics of covert and overt visual orienting: Evidence from attentional and oculomotor capture.

Five visual search experiments found oculomotor and attentional capture consistent with predictions of contingent orienting, contrary to claims that oculomotor capture is purely stimulus driven. Separate saccade and attend-only conditions contained a color target appearing either singly, with an onset or color distractor, or both. In singleton mode, onsets produced oculomotor and attentional capture. In feature mode, capture was absent or greatly reduced, providing evidence for top-down modulation of both types of capture. Although attentional capture by color abstractors was present throughout, oculomotor capture by color occurred only when accompanied by transient change, providing evidence for a dissociation between oculomotor and attentional capture. Oculomotor and attentional capture appear to be mediated by top-down attentional control settings, but transient change may be necessary for oculomotor capture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Temporal processing of emotional stimuli: The capture and release of attention by angry faces.

Neuroimaging data suggest that emotional information, especially threatening faces, automatically captures attention and receives rapid processing. While this is consistent with the majority of behavioral data, behavioral studies of the attentional blink (AB) additionally reveal that aversive emotional first target (T1) stimuli are associated with prolonged attentional engagement or “dwell” time. One explanation for this difference is that few AB studies have utilized manipulations of facial emotion as the T1. To address this, schematic faces varying in expression (neutral, angry, happy) served as the T1 in the current research. Results revealed that the blink associated with an angry T1 face was, primarily, of greater magnitude than that associated with either a neutral or happy T1 face, and also that initial recovery from this processing bias was faster following angry, compared with happy, T1 faces. The current data therefore provide important information regarding the time-course of attentional capture by angry faces: Angry faces are associated with both the rapid capture and rapid release of attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

When danger lurks in the background: Attentional capture by animal fear-relevant distractors is specific and selectively enhanced by animal fear.

Across 2 experiments, a new experimental procedure was used to investigate attentional capture by animal fear-relevant stimuli. In Experiment 1 (N = 34), unselected participants were slower to detect a neutral target animal in the presence of a spider than a cockroach distractor and in the presence of a snake than a large lizard distractor. This result confirms that phylogenetically fear-relevant animals capture attention specifically and to a larger extent than do non-fear-relevant animals. In Experiment 2 (N = 86), detection of a neutral target animal was slowed more in the presence of a feared fear-relevant distractor (e.g., a snake for snake-fearful participants) than in presence of a not-feared fear-relevant distractor (e.g., a spider for snake-fearful participants). These results indicate preferential attentional capture that is specific to phylogenetically fear-relevant stimuli and is selectively enhanced in individuals who fear these animals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociations of Personally Significant and Task-Relevant Distractors Inside and Outside the Focus of Attention: A Combined Behavioral and Psychophysiological Study.

Studies of attentional capture by personally significant stimuli have reached inconsistent results, possibly because of improper control of the participants' attention. In the present study, the authors controlled visual attention by using a Stroop-like task. Participants responded to a central color and ignored a word presented either centrally (i.e., at the focus of attention) or peripherally (i.e., outside the focus of attention). Central words led to slower reaction times and larger orienting responses for significant items than for neutral items. These effects largely disappeared when the words appeared in a peripheral location. The peripheral words interfered with performance when they were relevant to task demands. These results indicate that there is a fundamental difference between task-relevant words and personally significant words: The former capture attention even when presented peripherally, whereas the latter do not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contrasting two accounts of anxiety-linked attentional bias: Selective attention to varying levels of stimulus threat intensity.

Previous research has established that clinical anxiety patients and nonclinical populations with high levels of anxiety vulnerability characteristically orient attention toward moderately threatening stimuli. In contrast, populations with low levels of anxiety vulnerability typically orient attention away from such stimuli. The differing experimental predictions generated by 2 classes of hypothetical explanation for this anxiety-linked attentional discrepancy were tested, using attentional probe methodology to compare the attentional responses of high and low trait anxious individuals to facial stimuli of differing threat intensities. The results support the view that all individuals orient attention away from mildly threatening stimuli and toward strongly threatening stimuli, with differences in anxiety vulnerability reflecting the intensity of stimulus threat required to elicit the attentional vigilance response. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How do selected arrows guide visuospatial attention? Dissociating symbolic value and spatial proximity.

Previous research on the control of visuospatial attention showed that overlearned symbols like arrows have the potential to induce involuntary shifts of attention. Following work on the role of attentional control settings and of the content of working memory in the involuntary deployment of visuospatial attention, Pratt and Hommel (2003) found that this unintentional orienting by an arrow depended on its top-down selection, contingent on the attentional control settings, that is to say, the target selection cue. However, in this study, each arrow was closer to the location it indicated than to any other location, raising the issue of attention being drawn to the arrow location, facilitating processing at adjacent locations, rather than pushed to the symbolically cued location. In the present study, we dissociated symbolic cueing and spatial proximity cueing by the selected arrow. The results support the proximity cueing hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional capture by irrelevant color singletons.

Four experiments investigated attentional capture by a color singleton in visual search for a nonsingleton target. B. S. Gibson and E. M. Kelsey (1998) found that a color singleton in a precuing array facilitated target discrimination at that location if the same color also signaled the target array onset. The authors found similar cuing effects regardless of whether the singleton color matched the target array and regardless of whether subjects could anticipate the singleton or target-array color. In Experiment 4, a color singleton captured attention when it appeared in the precuing array but not when it appeared in the target array. The results indicate that attentional control settings for displaywide attributes are imprecise: Although subjects may anticipate a specific color, they cannot avoid attentional capture by other irrelevant colors. In addition, the effect of irrelevant singletons depends on whether a target is simultaneously present in the array. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Surprise-induced blindness: A stimulus-driven attentional limit to conscious perception.

The cost of attending to a visual event can be the failure to consciously detect other events. This processing limitation is well illustrated by the attentional blink paradigm, in which searching for and attending to a target presented in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors can impair one's ability to detect a second target presented soon thereafter. The attentional blink critically depends on 'top-down' attentional settings, for it does not occur if participants are asked to ignore the first target. Here we show that 'bottom-up' attention can also lead to a profound but ephemeral deficit in conscious perception: Presentation of a novel, unexpected, and task-irrelevant stimulus virtually abolishes conscious detection of a target presented within half a second after the 'Surprise' stimulus, but only for its earliest occurrences (generally 1 to 2 presentations). This powerful but short-lived deficit contrasts with a milder but more enduring form of attentional capture that accompanies singleton presentations in rapid serial visual presentations. We conclude that the capture of stimulus-driven attention alone can limit explicit perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)