Stimulus-driven attentional capture: Evidence from equiluminant visual objects.

Previous work has shown that abrupt visual onsets capture attention. Possible mechanisms for this phenomenon include (1) luminance-change detection system and (2) a mechanism that detects the appearance of new perceptual objects. Exps 1 and 2 revealed that attention is captured in visual search by the appearance of a new perceptual object even when the object is equiluminant with its background and thus exhibits no luminance change when it appears. Exp 3 showed that a highly salient luminance increment alone is not sufficient to capture attention. These findings suggest that attentional capture is mediated by a mechanism that detects the appearance of new perceptual objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)