When does feature search fail to protect against attentional capture?

ABSTRACT

When participants search for a shape (e.g., a circle) among a set of homogenous shapes (e.g., triangles) they are subject to distraction by colour singletons that are more salient than the target. However, when participants search for a shape among heterogeneous shapes, the presence of a non-target colour singleton does not slow responses to the target. Attempts have been made to explain these results from both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. What both accounts have in common is that they do not predict the occurrence of attentional capture on typical feature search displays. Here, we present a case where manipulating selection history, rather than the displays themselves, leads to attentional capture on feature search trials. The ability to map specific colours to the target and distractor appears to be what enables resistance to capture during feature search.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional capture
• attentional control
• feature search
• search modes
• selection history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use “majority” colour to refer to the colour of the items in the display that are not a colour singleton. For example, in the lower (colour-swapping) panel of Figure 1, on the second trial the majority colour is green and on the third trial the majority colour is red. Note that the target is always in the majority colour. Indeed, we could even replace the term majority colour with “target” colour.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by grants from the Office of Naval Research [grant number N000141010278], the Johns Hopkins University Science of Learning Institute, and NIH [core grant number 5P30EY001765].