Selectively ignoring locations does not modulate contingent involuntary orienting, but selectively attending does

ABSTRACT

Attending to a location in the visual field facilitates processing of objects in that location, and numerous studies have revealed processing benefits by precuing target locations. Recent studies have also demonstrated that precuing a location to ignore reduces distraction by items in that location; however, precuing a feature (colour) to ignore increases distractor interference, at least before a template for rejection is established. Thus, locations, not features, can be selectively ignored. The present study used a spatial cuing task to examine whether featurally-relevant items are selected when they appear in ignored locations. The results revealed contingent attentional capture by target-relevant cues (red cue when searching for red targets, but not for onset targets), even when the cue appeared in a location that was ignored. Importantly, this was equivalent to contingent capture elicited by cues in non-ignored locations. However, when observers were precued to the target location, contingent capture was largely eliminated. The results suggest salient items with target-relevant features are selected from selectively ignored locations, but focusing attention onto a location can preclude capture by salient and target-relevant items.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• ignoring
• contingent capture
• cuing

Acknowledgments

Portions of this study were presented at the 54^th meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Toronto, ON, Canada. I thank Thomas D. Kiselak, Elizabeth M. Oleksuik, and Devon B. Merkle for assistance with data collection and analysis.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out these design issues.

2 The 1650 ms presentation of the arrow was based on similar durations used in previous studies on ignoring (e.g., Chao, 2009, 2010; Moher & Egeth, 2012; Münneke et al., 2008).