Multiple attentional sets while monitoring rapid serial visual presentations

ABSTRACT

The present study examined whether observers are able to establish multiple attentional sets to concurrently monitor two different spatial locations. Observers identified a target letter in red or cyan among nontarget letters of other heterogeneous colours during a temporal feature search. A peripheral distractor display consisted of one item of either the same colour as the current target, and the other potential target colour, or an irrelevant colour that could never be the target. They identified an odd-ball colour letter among homogenous colours during a singleton search. The results revealed that observers maintained multiple attentional sets for detecting two singletons or for targets involving two (or three) features. However, they were unable to maintain a mixture of sets. Moreover, exposure to a distractor containing feature that corresponded to a feature of the current target was advantageous for target identification. The presence or absence of this set-specific capture depended on top-down knowledge and did not occur automatically in the singleton-detection stream. These results demonstrate a limitation in the flexibility of attentional sets. Although two singleton detections were possible, multiple attentional templates for a more complex attentional set could not be maintained concurrently when monitoring multiple rapid serial visual presentations.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention and memory
• Attentional set
• Cognitive control
• Visual attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Jun I. Kawahara http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4096-3923

Notes

1. We thank Katherine Moore for pointing out this possibility.

2. We thank Katherine Moore for these suggestions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [grant number 20530676], [grant number 26285168].