When the sense of fluency triggers an attentional bias

Abstract

Spatial attention can be captured automatically by an exogenous stimulus (e.g., digital interruption), or by an endogenous stimulus (e.g., valence of the stimulus). In the present study, we investigated whether a non-perceptual characteristic (e.g., sense of fluency) has an impact on attention. To this end, we used the conceptual fluency paradigm developed by Whittlesea (1993) combined with the dot-probe task developed by MacLeod, Matthews and Tata (1986). In 3 experiments, we measured the response times for each experimental situation (i.e., Valid and Non-valid situations). At each trial, participants were presented is three consecutive displays on a screen: 1) an incomplete and predictive sentence stem 2) a pair of words, one of them was semantically compatible with the previous sentence stem, and 3) a circle appeared at the spatial location of one of the words. Then, participants had to perform a Go (i.e., a filled circle) No-go (i.e., an empty circle) task. The analysis found that response times were significantly faster when the Go stimulus appeared at the same location as the semantically compatible word (i.e., Valid situations). Overall, our results show that the sense of fluency triggers attentional capture. Thus, they replicate those of Gardner and al. (2020) using another experimental paradigm. Our finding might be helpful to better understand the consequences of digital interruptions on behavioral performance