Contingent attentional capture occurs by activated target congruence

Abstract

680Attentional selection of information from a stimulus array is controlled in at least two distinct ways (Yantis, 1993). One way involves the viewer's ability to control what regions or objects should be selected on the basis of the viewer's goals or intentions (i.e., goal-directed, or top-down, selection). The other way is stimulus-driven, or bottom-up, selection, which refers to the fact that certain properties of a stimulus may capture attention independently of the viewer's current goals or intentions. Whereas goal-directed selection generally helps viewers' performance, stimulus-driven selection potentially disrupts it, because needless selection sometimes occurs. This article focuses on an interesting interaction between the viewers' top-down intentions and stimulus-driven attentional selection, which is known as contingent attentional capture. Contingent attentional capture is a phenomenon in which the viewer's attention is driven to select (or is captured by) a stimulus that looks like the current target.Contingent attentional capture has conventionally been explained in terms of needless shifts of spatial attention. For example, Folk, Remington, and Johnston (1992) found that responses to red targets were slower when they were preceded by a nonpredictive, or to-be-ignored, red cue that was presented at a spatial location different from the target location. They argued that because the target-defining property was the color red, all red objects were capable of capturing attention. Thus, when a red cue was presented at the wrong location, attention was involuntarily shifted to that location, which was a needless shift because an additional spatial shift was required to redirect attention to the target location. As alternative evidence of contingent attentional capture, Folk, Leber, and Egeth (2002) showed a transient deficit in target processing in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Observers viewed an RSVP stream of letters and searched for a target letter defined by a specific color (e.g., green). Before the target appearance, four distractors (#s) were presented at spatial locations adjacent to the RSVP stream. Identification accuracy for the target dropped sharply when one of the #s was presented in the target-defining color (e.g., green), whereas accuracy stayed constant when the distractors were a different color (e.g., gray). The obtained result was interpreted as a transient deficit in target processing caused by contingent attentional capture-that is, the needless shift of spatial attention away from the RSVP stream.In summary, it is likely that the selection of targets requires observers to establish a top-down attentional set for the target-defining property (e.g., the color green). Then, using the established attentional set, the observers select the corresponding stimuli (e.g., green objects) as potential targets, whether or not they are really targets, on the basis of bottom-up stimulus properties processed preattentively. Importantly, in order to make target selection effici...

Choosing attentional control settings in a dynamically changing environment

“…It also has been argued that attention can be tuned to a directional relationship between targets and distractors in feature space (e.g., prioritizing the Bredder^items in the display; Becker, 2010;Becker, Folk, & Remington, 2013). Recent work suggests that attention can be set for multiple features concurrently (Adamo, Wozny, Pratt & Ferber, 2010;Barrett & Zobay, 2014;Beck, Hollingworth & Luck, 2012;Irons, Folk & Remington, 2012;Kristjánsson, Jóhannesson & Thornton, 2014;Moore & Weissman, 2010, 2011Roper & Vecera, 2012) and possibly even more abstract semantic relations or category membership (Ariga & Yokosawa, 2008;Barnard, Scott, Taylor, May & Knightley, 2004;Leblanc & Jolicoeur, 2007;Wyble, Bowman & Potter, 2009;Wyble, Folk & Potter, 2013). Attentional control settings can be updated relatively flexibly and can switch between features in response to new task instructions with little carryover and a relatively short delay (Lien, Ruthruff & Johnston, 2010;Lien, Ruthruff & Naylor, 2014;Vickery, King & Jiang, 2005).…”

Set-specific capture can be reduced by pre-emptively occupying a limited-capacity focus of attention

“…Moreover, selective attention appears to be enabled by creating and maintaining one or more attentional sets, which specify the perceptual and/or conceptual attributes (e.g., color, location, size, shape, or semantic category) that define relevant stimuli (Adamo, Pun, Pratt, & Ferber, 2008; Ansorge & Heumann, 2003; Ariga & Yokosawa, 2008; Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992; Pashler & Huang, 2007; Pashler & Shiu, 1999). Guided by such attentional sets, top-down signals enhance the processing of relevant stimuli while limiting the processing of irrelevant stimuli (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002).…”

A revised diffusion model for conflict tasks

“…More generally, conceptual priming effects on lower-level perceptual processing show how the match between a conceptual representation and stimulus information can rapidly modulate ongoing processing (e.g., Lupyan and Ward 2013 ; Oliva and Torralba 2007 ). Further evidence from Ariga and Yokosawa ( 2008 ) suggests that congruency detection can also be evaluated at a more abstract level of representation in which a distractor shares an abstract semantic level of representation with a target. We therefore argue that the idea of conflict detection also applies at the level of response conflict arising in Simon tasks and at the level of semantic meaning in Stroop tasks, not only at perceptual in flanker tasks.…”