Stimulus-Driven Capture and Attentional Set: Selective Search for Color andVisual Abrupt Onsets

摘要

Recent evidence suggests that the occurrence of attentional capture is contingenton the attentional control setting induced by the task demands (Folk, Remington and Johnston, in press). Because the experiments on which these conclusions are based can be criticized for several reasons, the contingent capture hypothesis was tested by means of two visual search tasks in which subjects searched multielement displays in which a color singleton and onset singleton were simultaneously present. In addition, when subjects had to search for an onset singleton, on some trials another location contained an irrelevant color singleton. Both experiments show that the contingent capture hypothesis does not hold: 'irrespective of attentional set, attention was captured by the most salient singleton. The results of these experiments, together with previous findings, suggest a stimulus-driven model of performance in which selection is completely determined by the properties of the objects present in the visual field.