Attentional capture in visual search: Capture and post-capture dynamics revealed by EEG

Abstract

1Sometimes, salient-but-irrelevant objects (distractors) presented concurrently with a search 2 target cannot be ignored and attention is involuntarily allocated towards the distractor first. 3Several studies have provided electrophysiological evidence for involuntary misallocations of 4 attention towards a distractor, but much less is known about the mechanisms that are needed 5 to overcome a misallocation and re-allocate attention towards the concurrently presented 6 target. In our study, electrophysiological markers of attentional mechanisms indicate that (i) 7 the distractor captures attention before the target is attended, (ii) a misallocation of attention is 8 terminated actively (instead of attention fading passively), and (iii) the misallocation of 9 attention towards a distractor delays the attention allocation towards the target (rather than 10 just delaying some post-attentive process involved in response selection). This provides the 11 most complete demonstration, to date, of the chain of attentional mechanisms that are evoked 12 when attention is misguided and recovers from capture within a search display. 13

Inhibition in selective attention

“…The Pd, a transient positivity contralateral to the distractor, is especially relevant as its amplitude inversely scales with behavioral measures of distractor interference. [101][102][103] It is selectively elicited by distractors, and is independent from other lateralized components reflective of attentional selection, such as the N2pc 76,93,100,104 and N1pc. 104 Accordingly, the Pd has been proposed to reflect a mechanism that prevents or terminates the allocation of attention toward a salient distractor.…”

“…104 Accordingly, the Pd has been proposed to reflect a mechanism that prevents or terminates the allocation of attention toward a salient distractor. 10,105 Although in many cases the Pd follows the N2pc 76,102,[106][107][108] or N1pc 104 in the ERP waveform as predicted by the ignoring paradox, growing evidence indicates that salient distractors can also be inhibited (as evidenced by a Pd) in the absence of any neural evidence for attentional selection (e.g., the absence of an N2pc). 10 Notably, in the majority of these studies, the experimental design allowed for statistical learning, either because the target and distractor identities were fixed (i.e., same color/shape) across trials, 94,101,109,110 or because there was a high probability distractor location.…”

Biasing Allocations of Attention via Selective Weighting of Saliency Signals: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence for the Dimension-Weighting Account

“…Observers had to determine the orientation of the line within the circle (vertical vs. horizontal). b The additional-singleton task used by Liesefeld et al (2017). Observers had to determine the position of the notch in the bar tilted 12° to the left (top vs. bottom).…”

“…As a consequence, such a same-dimension distractor should reliably capture attention. Liesefeld et al (2017) directly tested this prediction with a 45° distractor and a 12° target, tilted into opposite directions (see Fig. 6b).…”

“…Relational coding (Becker 2010;Becker et al 2010) assumes that observers search for a singleton that differs from its surround in a particular direction (e.g., redder or larger) instead of searching for any singleton in a given dimension (e.g., red-green singleton or size singleton, without a negative or positive sign). It appears plausible that relational coding is possible for some dimensions, while other dimensions are restricted to general dimension weighting (such as orientation; Liesefeld et al 2017).…”