What You Do Is What You Set: Semantic Representations of Tasks and the Capture of Awareness

We designed two experiments in order to disambiguate the impact of meaning on the detection and awareness of an unexpected stimulus under conditions of inattentional blindness (IB). The key variable was the meaning of the unexpected stimulus. The meaning was either task-associated or task-unassociated. The unexpected stimulus was also always irrelevant to the performance of the task and shared no features with the expected stimuli. In both experiments, we found that an unexpected stimulus with task-associated meaning, independent of stimulus features and stimulus categories, enjoyed low levels of IB as well as high probability for entering conscious awareness. The results indicate that meaning is a prime determinant for the capture of conscious awareness. Our results also suggested that attentional sets encode a broad semantic instantiation of the current task, even if the task is entirely perceptual in nature.