Involuntary transfer of a top-down attentional set into the focus of attention: Evidence from a contingent attentional capture paradigm

Top-down contingent attentional capture during feed-forward visual processing.

Theeuwes (2010) summarizes an impressive number of studies demonstrating interference by irrelevant visual singletons in computer experiments with humans. In these studies, if participants search for a relevant singleton target, such as the single diamond among circles (i.e., a shape singleton), an irrelevant singleton distractor, such as the single red circle among the green stimuli (i.e., a c...

Contingent attentional capture by top-down control settings: converging evidence from event-related potentials.

Theories of attentional control are divided over whether the capture of spatial attention depends primarily on stimulus salience or is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands. The authors addressed this issue using the N2-posterior- contralateral (N2pc) effect, a component of the event-related brain potential thought to reflect attentional allocation. They presented a...

Reward can modulate attentional capture, independent of top-down set

The traditional distinction between exogenous and endogenous attentional control has recently been enriched with an additional mode of control, termed "selection history." Recent findings have indicated, for instance, that previously rewarded or punished stimuli capture more attention than their physical attributes would predict. As such, the value that is associated with certain stimuli modula...

Top-down control settings and the attentional blink: Evidence for nonspatial contingent capture

Previous studies have shown that spatial attention can be ‘‘captured’’ by irrelevant events, but only if the eliciting stimulus matches top-down attentional control settings. Here we explore whether similar principles hold for nonspatial attentional selection. Subjects searched for a coloured target letter embedded in an RSVP stream of letters inside a box centred on fixation. On critical trial...

Attention capture while switching search strategies: Evidence for a breakdown in top-down attentional control