Unique temporal change does not account for attentional capture by sudden onsets

Abstract

There is a considerable debate about which stimulus characteristics are able to capture attention in a purely exogenous way. Von Mühlenen, Rempel, and Enns (2005) proposed that unique temporal change accounts for much attentional capture phenomena. Here we reexamine this account by differentiating between the reaction time costs and benefits caused by salient singletons appearing at different times relative to the target display. Specifically we postulate that benefits are indicative of attentional capture, whereas costs only indicate interference by heterogenous distractors, suggesting that the deployment of attention has been merely slowed rather than captured. We find that unique temporal change only increases search costs, and does not affect reaction time benefits. In addition, manipulations of top-down search set provide converging evidence that unique temporal change is not sufficient to cause features to capture attention in the same bottom-up manner as sudden onsets.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award to Caleb Owens. We also thank Steven Yantis for his comments on this work.

Notes

¹The colour changes we implemented were accompanied by a slight luminance change, but since all stimuli were presented on a bright white background, we doubt the significance of this.

²Thanks to Steven Yantis for suggesting this interpretation.