The moment-by-moment attentional temperature: How do history effects influence attentional capture?

ABSTRACT

We agree with [Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2021). Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21] that selection history will play a role in explaining attentional capture. But their conception of history effects (or priming) lacks a clear explication of how attentional history fulfils the crucial role of guiding attention and modulating attentional capture. A full account must make the operational principles that enable attentional history to modify attentional capture explicit. Recent findings on how attentional history can tune target templates and how the learning of distractor feature distributions may influence attentional capture provide clues about mechanisms that can explain how attentional capture is modulated by attentional history.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• attentional capture
• attentional priming
• selection history

Disclosure statement

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