The Time Course of the Contingent Spatial Blink.

Abstract

Attentional capture is the unintentional deployment of attention to a task-irrelevant but attentionally salient object. The contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis states that it occurs only if a distractor's property matches current top-down attentional control settings (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). Folk, Leber, and Egeth (2002) found that monitoring a central RSVP stream for a coloured target led to spatial attentional capture by a peripheral distractor that matched the target colour. Using a similar paradigm, we explored the time course of this spatial blink. Implications of this study for current accounts of the attentional capture phenomenon are discussed.

The effect of fearful faces on the attentional blink is task dependent

“…Bonferronicorrected t tests revealed that the absence of a face was reported more accurately than were neutral and fearful faces [t(13) 5.38, p 3 .0005, and t(13) 5.11, p 3 .0005, Yi, and Chun (2004), who found no reduced scene detection performance in an AB paradigm when neutral faces could be ignored. Studies investigating the effect of neutral distractor stimuli in RSVP series have demonstrated that only distractor items precisely matching the participants' attentional set, as given by the target-defining feature, can trigger attentional capture (Folk, Leber, & Egeth, 2002;Lamy, Leber, & Egeth, 2004;Leblanc & Jolicoeur, 2005;Maki & Mebane, 2006). In the present experiments, faces did not share features with the scene target and, therefore, did not induce attentional capture in Experiment 3.…”

On the control of visual spatial attention: evidence from human electrophysiology

“…red) but not if the stimulus is in another colour (e.g. green ;Folk, Leber, & Egeth, 2002), a result which we replicated and extended in our laboratory (Leblanc & Jolicoeur, 2005). Such results demonstrate that attention control settings can exert a top-down influence on the degree to which bottom-up signals can capture spatial attention.…”

“…Bauer, Jolicoeur, & Cowan, 1996;Nagy & Sanchez, 1990). Furthermore, colour singletons appear to draw spatial attention to their location when subjects maintain the intention to find targets of that colour (Folk, Leber, & Egeth, 2002;Leblanc & Jolicoeur, 2005). In the latter case, the attentional capture effects appeared to take place automatically (once top-down attentional control settings were adopted by the subjects), given that the capture by the distractor always produced a decrement in report of the desired target.…”

Synergy of stimulus-driven salience and goal-directed prioritization: Evidence from the spatial blink

“…The magnitude of the spatial blink was approximately constant from lag 1 to lag 3 (corresponding to intervals of 80-240 msec) in the present experiment. Although some researchers have reported greater spatial blink magnitudes at lag 2 than at other lags (Folk et al, 2002, corresponding to a 168-msec delay; Lamy et al, 2004, 200 msec), others have found that the spatial blink effect peaked at lag 1 (Leblanc & Jolicoeur, 2005, 117 msec) and decreased as lag increased. It is possible that these differences are due to unique visual properties of the stimuli, such as the eccentricity and size of the distractors.…”