Top-down search strategies cannot override attentional capture

Top-down search strategies cannot override attentional capture.

Bacon and Egeth (1994) have claimed that color singletons do not interfere with search for a shape singleton when, instead of using a singleton detection mode, participants are forced to use a feature search mode. Bacon and Egeth induced a feature search mode by adding different shape singletons to the display so that observers could not simply respond to uniqueness to find the target. We did e...

It's under control: top-down search strategies can override attentional capture.

Bacon and Egeth (1994) proposed that observed instances of attentional capture by feature singletons (e.g., color) were the result of a salience-based strategy adopted by subjects (singleton detection mode) and, thus, were not automatic. They showed that subjects could override capture by adopting strategies based on searching for specific target features (feature search mode). However, Theeuwe...

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

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...

Overriding age differences in attentional capture with top-down processing.

Two experiments investigated the influence of top-down information on adult age differences in the ability to search for singleton targets using spatial cues. In Experiment 1, both younger and older adults were equally able to use target-related top-down information (target feature predictability) to avoid attentional capture by uninformative (25% valid) cues. However, during informative (75% v...