Immunity to attentional capture at ignored locations

Ruthruff, Eric; Gaspelin, Nicholas · 2017 · Attention Perception & Psychophysics

DOI: 10.3758/s13414-017-1440-4

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Summary

This study investigates the conflict between two opposing mechanisms of spatial attention: automatic attentional capture, where salient stimuli involuntarily draw focus, and spatial filtering, where observers actively ignore irrelevant regions. The authors address whether stimuli can capture attention even when they appear in locations that participants are forced to ignore. Previous research yielded mixed results, with some studies suggesting capture dominates filtering and others suggesting filtering can suppress capture. The authors hypothesize that previous failures to suppress capture resulted from weak incentives to filter; thus, they designed experiments that forced participants to establish strong spatial filters to determine if truly ignored locations are immune to capture. The researchers conducted three experiments using a modified spatial cuing paradigm. Participants searched for a target defined by a conjunction of color (red or green) and location (vertical or horizontal axis). Crucially, the "ignored" locations always contained a distractor matching the target color, forcing participants to filter those locations to avoid errors. Experiment 1 tested capture by salient-but-irrelevant abrupt onset cues. Experiment 2 replicated this using a different neutral baseline (central cue) and a more difficult search task to increase sensitivity. Experiment 3 tested capture using highly potent relevant cues that matched the target color. In all experiments, cues appeared at attended, ignored, or neutral locations, and response times were measured to assess capture effects. The results consistently demonstrated that spatial filtering dominates attentional capture. In Experiment 1, abrupt onsets at attended locations caused significant slowing (a 20-ms cue validity effect), but onsets at ignored locations produced no significant cost relative to cue-absent trials. Experiment 2 replicated this finding with a difficult search task; while attended invalid cues slowed responses by 23 ms, ignored invalid cues showed no significant difference from baseline conditions. Experiment 3 found that even target-colored cues, which typically produce strong capture, failed to capture attention when presented at ignored locations. In all cases, stimuli at ignored locations did not disrupt performance, whereas stimuli at attended locations did. The authors conclude that people are effectively immune to attentional capture by objects in ignored locations. This finding resolves the empirical discrepancy in previous literature by showing that when participants have sufficient incentive to filter, spatial filtering completely suppresses automatic capture, even for potent stimuli like abrupt onsets or target-colored cues. This implies that the attentional system can successfully "turn off" capture at irrelevant locations, allowing for sharp focus on task-relevant regions without interference from unexpected stimuli elsewhere.

Key finding

Observers are effectively immune to attentional capture by both salient irrelevant onsets and potent relevant cues when those stimuli appear in spatial locations that are actively ignored.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 113

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• attention selective divided
• inattentional change blindness
• visual search