The suppression of reflexive visual and auditory orienting when attention is otherwise engaged.

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether abrupt onsets are capable of reflexively capturing attention when they occur outside the current focus of spatial attention, as would be expected if exogenous orienting operates in a truly automatic fashion. The authors established a highly focused attentional state by means of the central presentation of a stream of visual or auditory characters, which participants sometimes had to monitor. No intramodal reflexive cuing effects were observed in either audition or vision when participants performed either an exogenous visual or auditory orthogonal cuing task together with the central focused attention task. These results suggest that reflexive unimodal orienting is not truly automatic. The fact that cuing effects were eliminated under both unimodal and cross-modal conditions is consistent with the view that auditory and visual reflexive spatial orienting are controlled by a common underlying neural substrate.

Onset capture requires attention

“…Note that onsets do indeed appear to satisfy the resistance-to-suppression criterion (Christ & Abrams, 2006). Our findings are consistent with previous results that showed that involuntary orienting caused by onsets was impaired by a concurrent dual task (Boot et al, 2005;Santangelo et al, 2007). In addition, the fact that the exogenous cuing effect only suffered at short target-probe lags (lag 2 in Experiment 1 and lags 2 and 3 in Experiment 2) and recovered at longer lags further indicates that involuntary orienting was sensitive to the manipulation of available attentional resources (attentional resources recover as target-probe lag increases).…”

“…There is clearly a discrepancy between the results of Ghorashi et al (2007) on one hand and Boot et al (2005) and Santangelo et al (2007) on the other. How can we reconcile the discrepancy?…”

“…For example, Boot, Brockmole, and Simons (2005) found that abrupt onsets failed to capture attention in visual search when subjects had to perform a concurrent auditory one-back task. Another recent study (Santangelo, Olivetti Belardinelli, & Spence, 2007) showed that both reflexive visual and auditory orienting were disrupted when subjects were instructed to attend to an RSVP or RSAP stream.…”

A re-examination of the impact of object processing on shifts of spatial attention

“…Error bars 95% within-subjects confidence intervals calculated as per Masson and Loftus (2003) there is evidence for a neuroanatomical overlap between areas involved in object processing during the AB, and exogenous orienting. Moreover, a number of studies have shown conditions under which attentional capture by exogenous cues is attenuated (e.g., Santangelo, Olivetti Belardinelli, & Spence, 2007;Theeuwes, 1991;Yantis & Jonides, 1990;see Santangelo & Spence, 2008 for a review). Together, this evidence suggests that processing of exogenous cues may be impacted by intention and concurrent task performance, consistent with the effects of object processing obtained in the current experiments.…”

Now hear this: Inattentional deafness depends on task relatedness

“…Furthermore, if the difficulty of a single task increases (high load), it could be expected that simultaneous performance of a second task (tone detection) should decrease, as greater cognitive control would be required to perform both tasks simultaneously. Santangelo, Olivetti Belardinelli, and Spence (2007), for example, demonstrated that under the highly focused attentional state required for monitoring a stream of centrally presented visual stimuli consisting of letters and numbers (a high-perceptual-load task), the performance of an orthogonal cuing task involving determining the spatial location of an auditory stimulus was diminished or eliminated. Similar effects have been found for the addition of a second attention-demanding task across other modalities (see , for a review).…”