Contingent attentional capture occurs by activated target congruence

Ariga, Atsunori; Yokosawa, Kôichi · 2008 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/pp.70.4.680

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Summary

This study investigates whether contingent attentional capture can occur for distractors that share a target-defining property at an abstract semantic level rather than a physical perceptual level. While traditional models suggest that attention is captured by stimuli matching the physical features of a target (e.g., color), the authors propose that the attentional set operates on abstract representations. Consequently, a distractor referring to the target-defining color semantically (e.g., the word "green") should capture attention similarly to a physically colored distractor, even if the distractor itself lacks that color. The researchers employed a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task using Japanese kanji characters. Participants searched for a target character defined by its color (green or red) amidst a stream of white filler characters. Before the target appeared, a distractor character was presented. The distractor type was manipulated across three conditions: congruent (the character’s meaning matched the target color, e.g., the word "green" when the target was green), incongruent (the meaning did not match, e.g., the word "red"), and neutral (a natural-thing character unrelated to color). The temporal interval between the distractor and target onset (distractor–target lag) was varied to measure the attentional blink (AB), a transient deficit in target identification caused by prior attentional capture. Four experiments were conducted, varying the target color (green vs. red) and the presentation rate (120 ms vs. 100 ms per frame). In Experiment 1A (green target, 120 ms rate), participants showed a significant deficit in identifying the target at short lags only when the distractor was semantically congruent. Experiment 1B (red target, 120 ms rate) initially showed no such effect, which the authors attributed to lower perceptual complexity of the red distractor character. To test this, Experiments 2A and 2B increased the presentation speed to 100 ms. Under these faster conditions, both green and red targets exhibited significant identification deficits at short lags exclusively in the congruent condition. The incongruent and neutral distractors did not impair target processing. These findings demonstrate that contingent attentional capture is not limited to physical feature matching but extends to abstract semantic representations. The results support the hypothesis that the attentional set scans stimuli based on abstract properties, causing semantic confusion between the meaning of a distractor and the color of a target. This implies that attentional selection mechanisms are sensitive to higher-level representations, and that stimuli can capture attention automatically if they align with the observer’s top-down set at a semantic level, even without physical congruence.

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Topics

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• attention selective divided
• inattentional change blindness
• visual search