Top-down search strategies cannot override attentional capture

Theeuwes, Jan · 2004 · Crossref

DOI: 10.3758/bf03206462

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Summary

This paper investigates whether top-down search strategies can override bottom-up attentional capture by irrelevant visual stimuli. The research addresses a debate in visual attention theory regarding whether attention is controlled by goal-directed settings or driven automatically by stimulus salience. Specifically, it challenges the findings of Bacon and Egeth (1994), who claimed that observers could eliminate interference from irrelevant color singletons by switching to a "feature search mode" when multiple shape singletons were present in a display. The author argues that this lack of interference was not due to strategic control but rather to reduced stimulus salience, which forced observers into a serial search process that naturally attenuates distraction. To test this hypothesis, the author conducted two experiments using visual search tasks where participants identified the orientation of a line segment within a target shape singleton (a diamond) amidst distractors. Crucially, other unique shape singletons (a square and a triangle) were included to prevent simple uniqueness detection, theoretically inducing a feature search mode. Experiment 1 used large display sizes (12 and 20 elements) to ensure high salience of both the target and an irrelevant color singleton distractor. Experiment 2 used smaller display sizes (5 and 9 elements), matching the conditions used by Bacon and Egeth, to reduce salience. The results demonstrated that in Experiment 1, where stimuli were highly salient and search was parallel (indicated by flat response time slopes), the irrelevant color singleton significantly interfered with performance, slowing response times by approximately 65 msec. This indicates that attentional capture occurred despite the top-down goal to ignore the color. In contrast, Experiment 2, with lower salience, showed no interference from the color singleton. However, this condition resulted in positive search slopes (11–13 msec/item), indicating that search was partly serial. The author concludes that the absence of capture in the low-salience condition was a byproduct of the serial search strategy required to find the less distinct target, not a voluntary suppression of bottom-up signals. The significance of these findings lies in challenging the concept of distinct "search modes" that allow top-down control over attentional capture. The author argues that the notion of a feature search mode that eliminates capture is incorrect. Instead, the results support a bottom-up account where attention is captured automatically by the most salient stimulus within the attentional window. The study suggests that while the size of the attentional window may be under top-down control, the capture of attention within that window is driven exclusively by bottom-up salience signals. Thus, top-down strategies cannot override attentional capture; they can only alter the search process in ways that indirectly reduce the impact of distractors.

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Topics

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• visual search
• inattentional change blindness
• attention selective divided