The attentional capture debate: the long-lasting consequences of a misnomer

ABSTRACT

The article by Luck, Gaspelin, Folk, Remington and Theeuwes (2021, Visual Cognition, 29, 1–21) attempts to integrate the views currently defended by prominent actors in the “attentional-capture” debate. However, it glosses over important differences that remain between the competing accounts. In this commentary, I suggest that many of the lingering divergences are rooted in the fact that the authors often base their conclusions on net capture / suppression effects rather than on the modulation of these effects by relevant variables. I illustrate with two concrete examples, how relying on the presence vs. absence of attentional capture or suppression prompts the authors to sacrifice parsimony in order to account for their findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Salience
• attentional set
• suppression
• visual search
• attention

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The target paper states that “the stimulus-driven account now specifies that proactive weighting of nonspatial features is possible but cannot overcome moderate or high levels of physical salience (Wang & Theeuwes, 2020)”. However, this is a misrepresentation of Wang and Theeuwes’ (2020) interpretation: these authors actually rejected the idea that the distractor's color was proactively suppressed. Instead, they argued that “if anything, the below-baseline suppression observed by Gaspelin et al. (2015) is the result of some idiosyncratic (most likely serial) search strategy that can operate only in displays containing a limited number of non-salient elements” (p. 6).

2 It is true, however, that most later studies that induced observers to search for a specific feature used heterogenous displays.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation [grant number 1286/16].