Involuntary Attentional Capture is Determined by Task Set: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Eimer, Martin; Kiss, Mónika · 2008 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20099

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Summary

This study investigates whether involuntary attentional capture by salient visual stimuli is a purely bottom-up process or if it is modulated by the observer’s current task set. The research addresses a longstanding debate in cognitive psychology between the view that attention is automatically captured by salient features regardless of intent (Theeuwes, 1991) and the contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis, which posits that capture depends on whether the stimulus features match task-relevant attributes (Folk et al., 1992). Previous behavioral studies struggled to distinguish between these accounts because reaction time data could support either immediate capture with rapid disengagement or no capture at all. To resolve this, the authors used event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the N2pc component, which serves as a precise temporal marker for the allocation of spatial attention. The researchers conducted two experiments using a spatial cueing paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants performed either a "colour task," requiring them to identify the orientation of a red target bar among grey distractors, or an "onset task," requiring identification of a single grey target bar without distractors. In both tasks, participants were preceded by a spatially uninformative cue consisting of a red colour singleton among grey dots. The N2pc was measured in response to these cues to determine if attention was captured by the colour singleton when colour was task-relevant versus when it was irrelevant. Experiment 2 was designed to rule out an alternative interpretation that the N2pc differences observed in Experiment 1 were due to distractor inhibition strategies rather than attentional capture. The results demonstrated that attentional capture is determined by task set. In the colour task, where the cue feature (colour) matched the target feature, participants exhibited significant behavioral spatial cueing effects and a robust early N2pc component (180–235 ms post-cue), indicating rapid attentional capture by the colour singleton. In contrast, in the onset task, where colour was irrelevant, there were no behavioral cueing effects and no early N2pc was elicited by the physically identical cues. Experiment 2 confirmed that these findings were not artifacts of distractor suppression strategies. The absence of an early N2pc in the onset task refuted the claim that attention is initially captured in a bottom-up fashion and then rapidly disengaged; if that were true, an early N2pc would have been present in both tasks. These findings provide strong evidence against the notion that attentional capture is an exogenous, stimulus-driven phenomenon independent of top-down control. Instead, the study supports the contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis, demonstrating that the current task set plays a central role in determining whether salient visual objects capture attention. The results imply that top-down intentions can effectively prevent or significantly delay the involuntary orienting of attention to task-irrelevant stimuli, highlighting the integration of bottom-up saliency and top-down goal-directed control in visual attention mechanisms.

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• attention selective divided