Attentional capture with rapidly changing attentional control settings.

Lien, Mei-Ching; Ruthruff, Eric; Johnston, James C.

doi:10.1037/a0015875

Cited by 90 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…This result strongly suggests that high-value distractors draw spatial attention, and the subsequent act of disengagement leaves an inhibitory trace at that location (33). Furthermore, a control experiment showed that the effect could only be attributable to reward feedback during training, ruling out the persistence of a deliberate attentional strategy as an explanation; this confirms a recent report that top-down goals in visual search can be adjusted flexibly within seconds (39), and further distinguishes value-driven capture from goal-directed attentional deployment.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Value-driven attentional capture

Anderson

Laurent

Yantis

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

985

137

1,350

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Attention selects which aspects of sensory input are brought to awareness. To promote survival and well-being, attention prioritizes stimuli both voluntarily, according to context-specific goals (e.g., searching for car keys), and involuntarily, through attentional capture driven by physical salience (e.g., looking toward a sudden noise). Valuable stimuli strongly modulate voluntary attention allocation, but there is little evidence that high-value but contextually irrelevant stimuli capture attention as a consequence of reward learning. Here we show that visual search for a salient target is slowed by the presence of an inconspicuous, taskirrelevant item that was previously associated with monetary reward during a brief training session. Thus, arbitrary and otherwise neutral stimuli imbued with value via associative learning capture attention powerfully and persistently during extinction, independently of goals and salience. Vulnerability to such valuedriven attentional capture covaries across individuals with working memory capacity and trait impulsivity. This unique form of attentional capture may provide a useful model for investigating failures of cognitive control in clinical syndromes in which value assigned to stimuli conflicts with behavioral goals (e.g., addiction, obesity).E ffective deployment of attention is critical to the successful performance of any cognitive task. Attention determines what aspects of the sensory input are selected for cognitive processing, memory storage, and awareness. Two modes of attentional control are widely believed to determine perceptual priority: a voluntary, goal-directed mode, in which attention is guided by contextually appropriate goals and intentions, and an involuntary, stimulus-driven mode, in which attention is captured by physically salient stimuli (1-4) or by task-irrelevant stimuli that share identifying features with a searched-for target (5, 6). Each of these modes of control present concomitant benefits and costs: voluntary control of attention is goal-specific but potentially slower to implement; involuntary attentional capture can rapidly orient the organism to unexpected changes that could signal danger or opportunity, but has the potential to cause distraction from intended acts of perception.Goal-directed and stimulus-driven modes of attentional control have long been a focus of intense investigation, and much has been learned about the operating principles of each mode of control and their interaction (1, 4). However, there is growing evidence that these are not the only influences on attentional deployment. To promote survival and well-being, the brain is optimized to learn about perceptual stimuli that signal the potential for procuring reward (7,8). Voluntary attention to stimuli that predict reward is an effective mechanism for efficiently selecting valuable stimuli (9). Many studies have shown that reward facilitates voluntary attention to task-relevant stimuli, and that reward-based strategies and priorities strongly influence attentional perf...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Value-driven attentional capture

Anderson

Laurent

Yantis

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

985

137

1,350

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…First, the target was defined as a feature singleton in their experiments, leaving open the possibility that participants adopted singleton detection mode as a strategy for identifying the target. In support of this, Lien, Ruthruff, and Johnston (2010) showed that when the target can be identified only on the basis of a particular feature, trial-by-trial adjustments in attentional control settings do, in fact, determine the selectivity in attentional selection. Second, the influence of top-down attentional control settings is still evident even when the cue does not match the target on the previous trial, although contingent capture effects are indeed stronger when the cue matches the former target color (Folk & Remington, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Dissociating location-specific inhibition and attention shifts: Evidence against the disengagement account of contingent capture

Anderson

Folk

2012

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The study of attentional capture has provided a rich context for assessing the relative influence of top-down and bottom-up factors in visual perception. Some have argued that attentional capture by a salient, irrelevant stimulus is contingent on top-down attentional set (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 18:1030-1044, 1992). Others, however, have argued that capture is driven entirely by bottom-up salience and that top-down factors influence the postallocation speed of disengagement from the irrelevant stimulus (e.g., Theeuwes, Acta Psychologica 135:77-99, 2010a). In support of this speed-of-disengagement hypothesis, recent findings from the modified spatial-cuing paradigm show that cues carrying a no-go target property produce reverse, or negative, cuing effects, consistent with inhibition of the cue location from which attention has been very quickly disengaged (Belopolsky, Schreij, & Theeuwes, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72, 326-341, 2010). Across six experiments, we show that this inhibitory process can be dissociated from shifts of spatial attention and is, thus, not a reliable marker of capture. We conclude that the data are inconsistent with the predictions of the disengagement hypothesis.

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“…'R' for red and parity judgment). Lien et al (2010) found that an irrelevant stimulus presented shortly before stimulus onset captured attention only when its color was task-relevant, and that this contingent capture effect was uninfluenced by task switch/repeat, suggesting that task-set preparation during the interval was completely effective in reconfiguring the feature set and thus suppressing capture by the irrelevant color. Experiments in our lab (Longman, Lavric & Monsell, 2013;Longman, Lavric, Munteanu, & Monsell, 2014) have led to a different conclusion for spatial attention.…”

Section: Other Evidence For Attentional Inertiamentioning

confidence: 96%

A change of task prolongs early processes: Evidence from ERPs in lexical tasks.

Elchlepp¹,

Lavric²,

Monsell³

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Switching tasks costs time. Allowing time to prepare reduces the cost, but usually leaves an irreducible "residual cost". Most accounts of this residual cost locate it within the responseselection stage of processing. To determine which processing stage is affected, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) as participants performed a reading or a perceptual judgment task and examined the effect of a task-switch on early markers of lexical processing. A task cue preceding a string of blue and red letters instructed the participant either to read the letter string (for a semantic classification in Experiment 1, a lexical decision in Experiment 2), or to judge the symmetry of its color pattern. In Experiment 1, having to switch to the reading task delayed the evolution of the effect of word frequency on the reading task ERP by a substantial fraction of the effect on RT. In Experiment 2, a task switch delayed the onset of the effect of lexical status on the ERP to about the same extent that it prolonged the RT. These effects indicate an early locus of (most of) the residual switch cost: we propose that this reflects a form of task-related attentional inertia. Other findings have implications for the automaticity of lexical access: effects of frequency, lexicality and orthographic familiarity on ERPs in the symmetry task indicated involuntary but attenuated orthographic and lexical processing even when attention was focused on a non-lexical property. 3It is generally harder to switch among several cognitive tasks than to continue to perform just one. A popular way to capture at least part of this multitasking overhead in the laboratory is to conduct a reaction time (RT) experiment in which, on each of a series of trials, a stimulus is presented, and the participant must perform one of several possible tasks. On some trials the task changes, on others it does not, other things being equal. Several such "task-switching" paradigms have been developed and extensively explored over the last two decades. (For reviews see Kiesel, Steinhauser, Wendt, Falkenstein, Jost, Philipp, & Koch, 2010;Monsell, 2003;Vandierendonck, Liefooghe, & Verbruggen, 2010). The most obvious phenomenon they reveal is the substantial cost to performance of a switch of task: the average RT for a correct response is longer (and there are usually more errors) when the task changes than when it does not.The opportunity to prepare for a task before presentation of the stimulus generally reduces this switch cost, but does not eliminate it (Meiran, 1996;Rogers & Monsell, 1995). To manipulate preparation time unconfounded by the time elapsing since the previous performance of a task, task-cuing can be used (Meiran, 1996): each stimulus follows the previous response by a standard interval, and a task cue precedes the stimulus by an interval which is independently manipulated to vary preparation time. As the cue-stimulus interval (CSI) is increased from zero, the RT switch cost reduces to an asymptotic residual cost, usually reached at a CSI of bet...

show abstract

Attentional capture with rapidly changing attentional control settings.

Cited by 90 publications

References 53 publications

Value-driven attentional capture

Value-driven attentional capture

Dissociating location-specific inhibition and attention shifts: Evidence against the disengagement account of contingent capture

A change of task prolongs early processes: Evidence from ERPs in lexical tasks.

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