Variations in the magnitude of attentional capture: Testing a two-process model

Anderson, Brian A.; Folk, Charles L. · 2010 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/app.72.2.342

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Summary

This study investigates the mechanisms underlying variations in the magnitude of attentional capture, specifically testing whether these variations reflect a continuous process or a two-process model involving mixtures of captured and uncaptured trials. The research addresses inconsistencies in previous literature regarding how much attention is involuntarily drawn by salient stimuli. The authors propose two competing explanations: a continuous model, where resource allocation varies smoothly with stimulus similarity, and a two-process model, where attention is either fully captured or not at all, with the frequency of capture varying based on similarity. The researchers employed a modified spatial cuing paradigm across two experiments. In Experiment 1, twenty participants searched for colored targets (red or green) preceded by uninformative peripheral cues. The cues varied in their similarity to the target color, ranging from 100% match to 0% match (orthogonal color), with intermediate blends (66%, 50%, 33%). The goal was to determine if the magnitude of attentional capture, measured by cue validity effects in reaction times (RTs), varied systematically with cue–target similarity. Experiment 2 utilized the data from Experiment 1 to perform a mixture analysis. This statistical method compared observed RT distributions for intermediate cue conditions against predicted distributions derived from mixing "basis" distributions of fully captured (100% match) and fully uncaptured (0% match) trials. Experiment 1 results demonstrated that the magnitude of attentional capture varied directly and linearly with the percentage of target color present in the cue. Cues matching the target produced strong capture effects, while orthogonal cues produced no capture or negative effects. Crucially, intermediate cues produced capture magnitudes that scaled with similarity, ruling out bottom-up luminance salience as the primary driver since the effect reversed when the target color changed. Experiment 2’s mixture analysis revealed that the observed RT distributions for intermediate cues were statistically inconsistent with the predictions of the two-process model. Specifically, the variance and shape of the intermediate distributions did not match the mixtures generated from the basis distributions. The findings support a continuous model of attentional capture, indicating that variations in capture magnitude reflect graded changes in the amount of attentional resources allocated on each trial, rather than a binary switch between captured and uncaptured states. This challenges the two-process hypothesis, which posits that capture is an all-or-none event occurring on a proportion of trials. The study concludes that top-down attentional control settings modulate capture continuously based on feature similarity, providing a more nuanced understanding of how selective attention operates in response to environmental stimuli.

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Topics

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• attention selective divided
• inattentional change blindness
• visual search
• multisensory crossmodal