Contingent Capture at a very short SOA: Evidence against Rapid Disengagement

Abstract

Salient cues that do not contain the target's defining attribute do not cause a spatial cueing effect in response time when presented 150 ms before the target. This can be explained by Contingent Capture (under which incongruent cues do not capture attention) and also by Rapid Disengagement (under which salient but incongruent cues cause only brief capture). To discriminate between these models, a very short SOA of 35ms was employed in the standard paradigm. As is true for longer SOAs, there was no evidence of attentional capture by salient but incongruent cues. Thus, the evidence to date favours Contingent Capture over Rapid Disengagement.

Acknowledgements

This project has been supported by Grants-in-Aid of Research for Doctoral Dissertations awarded by Sigma Xi, and Dissertation Support awarded by the College of Liberal Arts, the Pennsylvania State University, both to the first author. We thank Charles Folk, Dominque Lamy, Cathleen Moore, Jay Pratt, and Jan Theeuwes, and the members of the Vision & Information Processing Lab, for their comments on this work.