Dividing attentional capture

ABSTRACT

Is capture automatic or under our control? In a recent review, Luck and colleagues [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.] provide an important milestone for gauging our (attention researchers) progress with this question. While it may sometimes feel like we have made little progress, this article highlights major advances in our understanding of the tools/paradigms used to study capture, which culminated recently in a discovered role for suppression in regulating capture. Although valuable guidance for future research is offered, I argue that the article falls short in this area. The framework for integrating models of capture is too narrow and ignores the potential for stimuli to evoke multiple attentional effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional capture
• attentional control
• visual search

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada: [grant number RGPIN-2018-04689].