The roles of feature-specific task set and bottom-up salience in attentional capture: An ERP study.

Eimer, Martin; Kiss, Mónika; Press, Clare; Sauter, Disa · 2009 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1037/a0015872

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Summary

This study investigates the relative contributions of top-down task sets and bottom-up stimulus salience in feature-specific attentional capture. The research addresses a theoretical conflict between the "contingent involuntary orienting" hypothesis, which posits that attention is captured only by stimuli matching current goals, and the "rapid attentional disengagement" hypothesis, which suggests that salient stimuli capture attention regardless of task relevance but are quickly ignored if irrelevant. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the N2pc component as a marker of attentional selection and the anterior N2 as a marker of inhibitory control, the authors tested whether bottom-up salience facilitates capture or triggers inhibition when stimuli do not match the task set. In Experiment 1, participants performed a visual search task for a target bar of a specific color (red or blue) among distractors. Search arrays were preceded by spatially nonpredictive cues: target-colour singletons, nontarget-colour singletons, or heterogeneous target-colour cues (where the target-colour item was not a singleton). Behavioral results showed that target-colour singleton cues facilitated response times, indicating attentional capture. Crucially, heterogeneous target-colour cues, which were less salient because they were not unique singletons, produced cueing effects nearly as strong as the singleton cues. This finding suggests that high bottom-up salience is not a necessary condition for task-set contingent capture; top-down goals dominate. Electrophysiologically, both target-colour singleton and heterogeneous cues elicited N2pc components, confirming attentional capture. In contrast, nontarget-colour singleton cues did not trigger an N2pc, refuting the rapid disengagement hypothesis. Instead, these irrelevant cues elicited an enhanced anterior N2 component, indicative of active top-down inhibition. Experiment 2 further examined the consequences of this inhibition. The study found that nontarget-colour singleton cues produced inverted behavioral cueing effects, meaning responses were slower when targets appeared at the cued location. This behavioral delay was accompanied by a delayed N2pc to the subsequent target at the cued location. This pattern indicates that perceptually salient but task-irrelevant stimuli trigger location-specific inhibition mechanisms that temporarily hinder the selection of targets appearing at those locations. The significance of these findings lies in clarifying the mechanisms of attentional control. The results demonstrate that attentional capture is strongly mediated by top-down task sets rather than bottom-up salience, as capture occurs even for low-salience stimuli matching the task set. Furthermore, the study provides direct electrophysiological evidence that salient, task-irrelevant stimuli are not merely ignored but are actively inhibited, a process that can delay subsequent target selection. This supports a model where contingent capture operates at the level of specific stimulus features, with bottom-up salience playing a secondary role primarily in triggering inhibitory processes for irrelevant distractors.

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• attention selective divided