Which kind of attention is captured by cues with the relative target colour?

ABSTRACT

Most theories of visual search maintain that attention is selectively tuned to the attributes of the search target (e.g., orange). Conversely, according to the relational account, attention is biased to the relative feature of the target (e.g., redder). However, previous studies that supported the relational account mainly measured mean response times. Hence, the results might not reflect early, perceptual mechanisms (e.g., signal enhancement) but later, decision-based mechanisms (channel selection). The current study tested the relational account against feature-specific theories in a spatial cueing task, in which the targets were backward-masked, and target identification accuracy was measured. The first experiment corroborated earlier results, demonstrating that relational effects are due to signal enhancement. In the second experiment, we chose highly discriminable colours along the blue–red continuum, and obtained results that were more consistent with broad feature-specific rather than relational tuning. The implications of these findings for current theories of attention are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual attention
• attentional capture
• perceptual sensitivity
• masking
• visual search

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Josef G. Schönhammer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6635-2100

Notes

1 We display the percentage of errors instead of the usual percentage of correct responses to make the results more easily comparable to those from RTs experiments.

2 The validity effect for the cue with the more extreme colour (Cue 1) tended to be larger than that for the less extreme cue (Cue 2), F(1, 18) = 3.8, p = .064, η_p² = 0.17. It is currently unclear why these validity effects differed in size; however, these differences in the magnitude of validity effects appear to be unreliable across studies. In studies that measured validity effects on mean RTs, no such differences occurred (Becker et al., 2013; Harris et al., 2013), or the validity effects for the more extreme cues were smaller than for the less extreme cues (Schönhammer, Grubert, Kerzel, & Becker, 2016). Moreover, inverse validity effects tended to be larger for Cue 3 than Cue 4, F(1, 15) = 3.4, p = .073, η_p² = 0.16, but also this difference was unreliable across studies.

Additional information

Funding

DK and JGS were supported by the Swiss National Foundation grants PDFMP1-129459 and 100014_162750. SIB was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT130101282); Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung.