The roles of feature-specific task set and bottom-up salience in attentional capture: An ERP study

摘要

We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a colour-defined target. For target-colour singleton cues, behavioural spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cue-induced N2pc components, indicative of attentional capture. These effects were only minimally attenuated for non-singleton target-colour cues, underlining the dominance of top-down task over salience set in attentional capture. Nontarget-colour singleton cues triggered no N2pc, but instead an anterior N2 component indicative of top-down inhibition. In Experiment 2, inverted behavioural cueing effects of these cues were accompanied by a delayed N2pc to targets at cued locations, suggesting that perceptually salient but task-irrelevant visual events trigger location-specific inhibition mechanisms which can delay subsequent target selection.