No identification of abrupt onsets that capture attention: evidence against a unified model of spatial attention
DOI: 10.1007/s00426-020-01367-4
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Summary
This paper investigates whether involuntary attentional capture by salient stimuli, such as abrupt onsets, is functionally equivalent to voluntary shifts of spatial attention. The "unified model" of spatial attention assumes that all attentional shifts, whether voluntary or involuntary, enhance the identification of attended objects. The authors test this assumption by examining compatibility effects in spatial cueing experiments, specifically asking if abrupt onsets that capture attention involuntarily also lead to enhanced processing of the cue’s identity. The study employed a series of four experiments using a spatial cueing paradigm where participants searched for a target number word (e.g., "one") and indicated if it was greater or less than five. Precues were digits that abruptly onsets. The design manipulated two factors: predictiveness (whether the precue location predicted the target location) and task-relevance (whether the precue had the target’s color). Crucially, the authors used digits for precues and number words for targets to prevent physical identity matching, thereby isolating semantic and response compatibility effects from low-level feature priming. This design allowed for the measurement of compatibility effects, which serve as an index of enhanced identification of the precue. The results revealed a critical dissociation. Precues that reliably predicted the target location (voluntary attention) and nonpredictive precues that were task-relevant (contingent capture) both produced significant compatibility effects, indicating that these cues were deeply processed. However, four separate experiments failed to find compatibility effects for nonpredictive, task-irrelevant abrupt onsets, despite these same cues producing large cue validity effects (up to 186 ms), which confirmed that attention was indeed captured. This demonstrates that while salient abrupt onsets can shift spatial attention, they do not necessarily enhance the identification of the eliciting stimulus. These findings argue against the unified model of spatial attention. The data suggest that salience-based attention capture recruits different attentional mechanisms than contingent capture or voluntary shifts. Specifically, involuntary capture by task-irrelevant salient stimuli appears to involve a shallow form of attentional orienting that does not engage the deeper processing stages required for object identification, distinguishing it from the functional consequences of voluntary or goal-driven attentional shifts.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via author_sweep_intake on 2026-05-28.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-28 |
| archive | success | manual_pmc_pow_fetch | — | — | 41 | 2026-08-22 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 4 | 2026-08-23 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| enrich | success | semantic_scholar | — | — | 9 | 2026-06-21 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.8-27b-gittensor | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-23 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-25 |
Summary generated by qwen3.8-27b-gittensor on 2026-08-23; verification: pending re-verification.
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