Involuntary attentional capture by abrupt onsets

Remington, Roger W.; Johnston, James C.; Yantis, Steven · 1992 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/bf03212254

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Summary

This study investigates whether abrupt visual onsets involuntarily capture spatial attention, even when observers have a strong incentive and opportunity to ignore them. The research addresses a gap in previous literature, which often used conditions where abrupt onsets were task-relevant or probabilistically valid predictors of target location, leaving open the possibility that attentional shifts were voluntary. The authors aim to determine if attentional capture is truly involuntary by creating experimental conditions where ignoring the distractor is optimal for performance. The researchers conducted five experiments using a speeded two-choice discrimination task. Subjects identified target letters ("8" or "0" in Experiments 1–2; "x" or "=" in Experiment 3) appearing in one of four boxes. Prior to target presentation, an abrupt-onset flash stimulus was displayed. The spatial relationship between the flash and the target was held constant within blocks: the flash appeared in the same box as the target (SAME), a different box (DIFF), at fixation (CENTER), in all boxes (ALL), or not at all (NONE). Crucially, subjects were informed of these relationships and instructed to ignore flashes in distraction conditions (DIFF, CENTER, ALL) to maximize response speed. Experiment 1 used a fixed foreperiod, while Experiments 2 and 3 introduced a random foreperiod and swapped the physical features of flash and target stimuli to ensure results were not due to stimulus properties or temporal predictability. Results from Experiments 1, 2, and 3 consistently showed that response times (RTs) were significantly slower in the DIFF, CENTER, and ALL conditions compared to the SAME and NONE conditions. In Experiment 1, SAME RTs were 483 ms, while DIFF RTs were 511 ms. This interference effect persisted across variations in foreperiod predictability and stimulus features. Specifically, the DIFF condition, where the flash never indicated the target location, produced significant slowing despite the clear incentive to ignore it. The CENTER condition also showed significant interference, suggesting that even knowing the exact location of a distractor does not prevent attentional capture. Error rates did not differ significantly across conditions, ruling out speed-accuracy tradeoffs as the cause of the RT increases. The findings provide strong evidence that spatial attention is involuntarily captured by abrupt onsets. Because subjects could not suppress the attentional shift to the distractor despite knowing it was irrelevant and being motivated to ignore it, the capture process appears to be automatic and outside voluntary control. This supports the hypothesis that exogenous, stimulus-driven factors can override endogenous, goal-directed attentional settings. The study concludes that under these conditions, it is not possible to voluntarily inhibit an attentional response to an abrupt onset, highlighting the powerful and involuntary nature of bottom-up attentional capture.

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Topics

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• attention selective divided
• inattentional change blindness