Progress Toward Resolving the Attentional Capture Debate.

For over 25 years, researchers have debated whether physically salient stimuli capture attention in an automatic manner, independent of the observer's goals, or whether the capture of attention depends on the match between a stimulus and the observer's task set. Recent evidence suggests an intermediate position in which salient stimuli automatically produce a priority signal, but the capture of attention can be prevented via an inhibitory mechanism that suppresses the salient stimulus. Here, proponents from multiple sides of the debate describe how their original views have changed in light of recent research, as well as remaining areas of disagreement. These perspectives highlight some emerging areas of consensus and provide new directions for future research on attentional capture.

The attentional blink: A relational accountof attentional engagement.

Visual attention allows selecting relevant information from cluttered visual scenes and is largely determined by our ability to tune or bias visual attention to goal-relevant objects. Originally, it was believed that this top-down bias operates on the specific feature values of objects (e.g., tuning attention to orange). However, subsequent studies showed that attention is tuned to in a context-dependent manner to the relative feature of a sought-after object (e.g., the reddest or yellowest item), which drives covert attention and eye movements in visual search. However, the evidence for the corresponding relational account is still limited to the orienting of spatial attention. The present study tested whether the relational account can be extended to explain attentional engagement and specifically, the attentional blink (AB) in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. In two blocked conditions, observers had to identify an orange target letter that could be either redder or yellower than the other letters in the stream. In line with previous work, a target-matching (orange) distractor presented prior to the target produced a robust AB. Extending on prior work, we found an equally large AB in response to relatively matching distractors that matched only the relative color of the target (i.e., red or yellow; depending on whether the target was redder or yellower). Unrelated distractors mostly failed to produce a significant AB. These results closely match previous findings assessing spatial attention and show that the relational account can be extended to attentional engagement and selection of continuously attended objects in time.

Conjunction search: Can we simultaneously bias attention to features and relations?

Attention allows selection of sought-after objects by tuning attention in a top-down manner to task-relevant features. Among other possible search modes, attention can be tuned to the exact feature values of a target (e.g., red, large), or to the relative target feature (e.g., reddest, largest item), in which case selection is context dependent. The present study tested whether we can tune attention simultaneously to a specific feature value (e.g., specific size) and a relative target feature (e.g., relative color) of a conjunction target, using a variant of the spatial cueing paradigm. Tuning to the specific feature of the target was encouraged by randomly presenting the conjunction target in a varying context of nontarget items, and feature-specific versus relational tuning was assessed by briefly presenting conjunction cues that either matched or mismatched the relative versus physical features of the target. The results showed that attention could be biased to the specific size and the relative color of the conjunction target or vice versa. These results suggest the existence of local and relatively low-level attentional control mechanisms that operate independently of each other in separate feature dimensions (color, size) to choose the best search strategy in line with current top-down goals.

Neural mechanisms of goal-contingent task disengagement: Response-irrelevant stimuli activate the default mode network.

As we experience the world, we must decide not only when and how to act based on input from the environment, but also when to avoid responding in situations where acting could lead to a detrimental outcome. The ability to regulate behavior in this way requires flexible cognitive control, as the same stimulus may call for a response in one context but not in another. In this sense, explicit non-responding can be characterized as an active, goal-directed cognitive process. Little is known about the mechanisms by which a currently active goal state modulates information processing to support the avoidance of undesired responding. In the present study, participants executed or withheld responses to a color target based whether its color matched that of a cue at the beginning of each trial. Behavioral and neural responses to task-irrelevant stimuli appearing as distractors were examined as a function of their relationship to the currently response-relevant color indicated by the cue. We observed a robust pattern in which stimuli possessing the currently response-irrelevant feature activate the default mode network (DMN), which was associated with a behavioral cost on trials in which this stimulus competed with a response-relevant target. Our findings reveal a role for the DMN in goal-directed cognitive control, facilitating active disengagement based on contextually-specific task demands.

Mechanisms of habitual approach: Failure to suppress irrelevant responses evoked by previously reward-associated stimuli.

Reward learning has a powerful influence on the attention system, causing previously reward-associated stimuli to automatically capture attention. Difficulty ignoring stimuli associated with drug reward has been linked to addiction relapse, and the attention system of drug-dependent patients seems especially influenced by reward history. This and other evidence suggests that value-driven attention has consequences for behavior and decision-making, facilitating a bias to approach and consume the previously reward-associated stimulus even when doing so runs counter to current goals and priorities. Yet, a mechanism linking value-driven attention to behavioral responding and a general approach bias is lacking. Here we show that previously reward-associated stimuli escape inhibitory processing in a go/no-go task. Control experiments confirmed that this value-dependent failure of goal-directed inhibition could not be explained by search history or residual motivation, but depended specifically on the learned association between particular stimuli and reward outcome. When a previously high-value stimulus is encountered, the response codes generated by that stimulus are automatically afforded high priority, bypassing goal-directed cognitive processes involved in suppressing task-irrelevant behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record

Unexpected abrupt onsets can override a top-down set for color.

A substantial literature supports the contention that the involuntary allocation of spatial attention to salient stimuli is contingent on the top-down goals of the observer. However, recent studies suggest that stimuli that violate expectations built up through experience can override top-down set, resulting in cognitively impenetrable, involuntary shifts of spatial attention. The present studies provide a strong test of this hypothesis by manipulating the frequency of presentation of salient, irrelevant, stimuli in spatial cuing and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigms. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 found that for targets defined by color, infrequent, uninformative onset precues produce evidence of capture, but that for targets defined by onset, infrequent color singleton precues do not. Experiment 4 provides strong converging evidence for the ability of infrequent onsets to override a top-down set for color; when monitoring an RSVP stream for a colored target, an infrequent onset in the periphery produced a decrement in target report indicative of attentional capture. Together, the results suggest that infrequent onsets represent a special class of stimuli that can produce involuntary shifts of spatial attention that are cognitively impenetrable.

Onsets do not override top-down goals, but they are responded to more quickly.

Do onsets automatically capture attention? Spatial-cuing experiments often reveal no capture by onset cues in searches for color targets. However, recent experiments have shown faster responses to an uncued color target presented as an abrupt onset than as a change to an existing item, which has been argued to reflect capture by the onset. In the present experiment, we tested whether this onset advantage reflects the capture of attention or processing independent of shifts of attention. In a modified spatial-cuing paradigm, noninformative color precues were paired with color targets presented as abrupt onsets or as no-onset characters. Critically, the number of other onset items in the target display was manipulated, which has previously been shown to disrupt attention allocation to any particular item. It was reasoned that if the onset advantage for uncued color targets reflects attentional capture, then the appearance of additional onsets should eliminate this advantage. The results showed that even with multiple onsets on the target display, the onset advantage remained additive with cue validity. The additive effects are inconsistent with automatic capture by onsets, suggesting instead that the onset advantage arises from an independent source.

Conditional automaticity in response selection: contingent involuntary response inhibition with varied stimulus-response mapping.

One aspect of effective cognitive control is the ability to withhold contextually inappropriate responses. The inhibition of a response can be elicited by a goal-relevant stop signal, which has been characterized as a voluntary cognitive process. Cases in which inhibition is triggered automatically by a stimulus have been reported but are limited to instances in which the withholding of a response is associated with the same stimulus over repeated trials, which reflects the gradual emergence of automaticity through associative learning. Findings such as these suggest that inhibitory control is driven by two dissociable mechanisms, one that is flexible but deliberate and another that is automatic but inflexibly learned. In the present study, we showed that response inhibition can be involuntarily triggered when stimulus-response mapping varies unpredictably, without contributions from associative learning. Our findings demonstrate that automatic response inhibition can be flexibly conditioned on top-down goals, which has broad implications for theories of cognitive control.

Dissociating compatibility effects and distractor costs in the additional singleton paradigm.

The interpretation of identity compatibility effects associated with irrelevant items outside the nominal focus of attention has fueled much of the debate over early versus late selection and perceptual load theory. However, compatibility effects have also played a role in the debate over the extent to which the involuntary allocation of spatial attention (i.e., attentional capture) is completely stimulus-driven or whether it is contingent on top-down control settings. For example, in the context of the additional singleton paradigm, irrelevant color singletons have been found to produce not only an overall cost in search performance but also significant compatibility effects. This combination of search costs and compatibility effects has been taken as evidence that spatial attention is indeed allocated in a bottom-up fashion to the salient but irrelevant singletons. However, it is possible that compatibility effects in the additional singleton paradigm reflect parallel processing of identity associated with low perceptual load rather than an involuntary shift of spatial attention. In the present experiments, manipulations of load were incorporated into the traditional additional singleton paradigm. Under low-load conditions, both search costs and compatibility effects were obtained, replicating previous studies. Under high-load conditions, search costs were still present, but compatibility effects were eliminated. This dissociation suggests that the costs associated with irrelevant singletons may reflect filtering processes rather than the allocation of spatial attention.

Attentional capture does not depend on feature similarity, but on target-nontarget relations.

What factors determine which stimuli of a scene will be visually selected and become available for conscious perception? The currently prevalent view is that attention operates on specific feature values, so attention will be drawn to stimuli that have features similar to those of the sought-after target. Here, we show that, instead, attentional capture depends on whether a distractor's feature relationships match the target-nontarget relations (e.g., redder). In three spatial-cuing experiments, we found that (a) a cue with the target color (e.g., orange) can fail to capture attention when the cue-cue-context relations do not match the target-nontarget relations (e.g., redder target vs. yellower cue), whereas (b) a cue with the nontarget color can capture attention when its relations match the target-nontarget relations (e.g., both are redder). These results support a relational account in which attention is biased toward feature relationships instead of particular feature values, and show that attentional capture by an irrelevant distractor does not depend on feature similarity, but rather depends on whether the distractor matches or mismatches the target's relative attributes (e.g., relative color).

Contingent attentional capture by conceptually relevant images.

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined attentional-control settings of the viewer. Contingent capture has been demonstrated for low-level features, such as color, motion, and orientation. In the present paper we show that contingent capture can also occur for conceptual information at the superordinate level (e.g., sports equipment, marine animal, dessert food). This effect occurs rapidly (i.e., within 200 ms), is a spatial form of attention, and is contingent on attentional-control settings that change on each trial, suggesting that natural images can be decoded into their conceptual meaning to drive shifts of attention within the time course of a single fixation.

Contingent involuntary motoric inhibition: the involuntary inhibition of a motor response contingent on top-down goals.

Effective motor control involves both the execution of appropriate responses and the inhibition of inappropriate responses that are evoked by response-associated stimuli. The inhibition of a motor response has traditionally been characterized as either a voluntary act of cognitive control or a low-level perceptual bias arising from processes such as inhibition of return and priming. Involuntary effects of top-down goals on motoric inhibition have been reported, but involve the perseveration of an inhibitory strategy. It is unknown whether the inhibition of a motor response can be selectively triggered by a goal-relevant stimulus, reflecting the automatic activation of a top-down inhibitory strategy. Here we show that irrelevant flankers that share the color of a no-go target elicit the inhibition of their associated motor response while other-colored flankers do not, even when participants have sufficient time to prepare for the upcoming target while ignoring the flankers. Our results demonstrate contingent involuntary motoric inhibition: motoric inhibition can be automatically triggered by a stimulus based on top-down goals.

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

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.

All set! Evidence of simultaneous attentional control settings for multiple target colors.

Although models of visual search have often assumed that attention can only be set for a single feature or property at a time, recent studies have suggested that it may be possible to maintain more than one attentional control setting. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether spatial attention could be guided by multiple attentional control settings for color. In a standard spatial cueing task, participants searched for either of two colored targets accompanied by an irrelevantly colored distractor. Across five experiments, results consistently showed that nonpredictive cues matching either target color produced a significant spatial cueing effect, while irrelevantly colored cues did not. This was the case even when the target colors could not be linearly separated from irrelevantly cue colors in color space, suggesting that participants were not simply adopting one general color set that included both target colors. The results could not be explained by intertrial priming by previous targets, nor could they be explained by a single inhibitory set for the distractor color. Overall, the results are most consistent with the maintenance of multiple attentional control settings.

The role of relational information in contingent capture.

On the contingent capture account, top-down attentional control settings restrict involuntary attentional capture to items that match the features of the search target. Attention capture is involuntary, but contingent on goals and intentions. The observation that only target-similar items can capture attention has usually been taken to show that the content of the attentional control settings consists of specific feature values. In contrast, the present study demonstrates that the top-down target template can include information about the relationship between the target and nontarget features (e.g., redder, darker, larger). Several spatial cuing experiments show that a singleton cue that is less similar to the target but that shares the same relational property that distinguishes targets from nontargets can capture attention to the same extent as cues that are similar to the target. Moreover, less similar cues can even capture attention more than cues that are identical to the target when they are relationally better than identical cues. The implications for current theories of attentional capture and attentional guidance are discussed.

Target-uncertainty effects in attentional capture: color-singleton set or multiple attentional control settings?

Previous spatial cuing studies have shown that the capture of spatial attention is contingent on top-down attentional control settings whose specificity varies as a function of the certainty of the defining features of the target. For example, when the target is a singleton defined by one specific color, observers adopt a control setting for that color. When the target can be one of two possible colors, however, observers appear to adopt a control setting for color singletons in general (see, e.g., Folk & Remington, 2008). The present study tested whether such results instead reflect the simultaneous maintenance of control settings for multiple colors (Adamo, Pun, Pratt, & Ferber, 2008). Observers searched for targets that were unpredictably red or green, preceded by spatial cues that were red, green, or blue. All three cue types produced evidence of capture, consistent with a general set for color singletons rather than the maintenance of multiple control settings.

Variations in the magnitude of attentional capture: testing a two-process model.

Although large variations in the magnitude of attentional capture have been evidenced across a wide range of studies and paradigms (see Burnham, 2007, for a review), the nature of these variations is unclear. In the present study, we used a modified spatial cuing task to address two related issues. In the first experiment, we explored the hypothesis that the magnitude of attentional capture varies systematically as a function of cue-target similarity. Targets of a particular color were preceded by uninformative peripheral cues carrying varying percentages of the target color. As was predicted, the magnitude of attentional capture varied directly with the similarity between cue and target. In the second experiment, we explored whether these similarity effects reflect a mixture of trials on which attention is fully captured and trials on which attention is not captured at all (i.e., a two-process model). A mixture analysis conducted on obtained reaction time distributions proved inconsistent with a two-process model.

Additivity of abrupt onset effects supports nonspatial distraction, not the capture of spatial attention.

In a recent article, Schreij, Owens, and Theeuwes (2008) reported that abruptly onsetting distractors produce costs in performance even when spatial-cuing effects confirm the presence of a top-down set for color. The authors argued that these results show that abruptly onsetting new objects capture attention independent of a top-down set and, thus, provide conclusive evidence against the theory that attentional capture is contingent on top-down attentional control settings (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). In the following article, we argue that, contrary to the conclusion drawn by Schreij et al., their own data (1) disconfirm the claim that their abrupt onsets captured spatial attention and (2) are consistent with nonspatial interference accounts of singleton-distractor effects. In support of the nonspatial account, we show that in a paradigm similar to Schreij et al.'s, distractors that do not capture attention can nonetheless influence responses to a target. We conclude that the results of Schreij et al. do not represent a challenge to contingent capture theory.

How to keep attention from straying: get engaged!

Previous research has suggested that the involuntary allocation of spatial attention to salient, irrelevant stimuli (i.e., attentional capture) is prevented when attention is in a focused state (e.g., Yantis & Jonides, 1990). Recent work has suggested that although focused attention may be necessary to prevent attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli, it is not sufficient (e.g., Folk, Leber, & Egeth, 2002). The present experiments provide evidence that attentional engagement, rather than attentional focusing, prevents capture. Observers performed a rapid serial visual presentation task in which they were asked to identify a target letter defined by color. Peripheral distractors that shared the color of the target produced evidence of attentional capture. This effect was completely eliminated, however, when the peripheral distractor was preceded by a central distractor designed to engage attention on the stream. It is concluded that attentional engagement serves to lock out capture by irrelevant, salient stimuli.