Unintended Allocation of Spatial Attention to Goal-Relevant but Not to Goal-Related Events

Vogt, Julia; De Houwer, Jan; Moors, Agnes · 2011 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000042

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Summary

This study investigates whether active goals automatically guide spatial attention toward goal-relevant stimuli, even when individuals have no intention to attend to them. The research addresses a gap in theories of automatic goal pursuit by distinguishing between "goal-relevant" events (directly fulfilling the goal) and "goal-related" events (semantically associated but not directly fulfilling the goal). Specifically, the authors tested whether attention is unintentionally captured by goal-relevant words while ignoring goal-related synonyms, and whether this effect persists when attending to cues is not instrumental for task performance. The experiment employed a dual-task design with 16 participants. One task induced a specific goal: participants responded to target words (e.g., "ship") and corresponding pictures. The second task was a modified spatial cueing paradigm where participants detected visual probes flanked by word cues. These cues included goal-relevant words, goal-related synonyms (e.g., "boat"), control words, and control-related synonyms. Crucially, the cue validity ratio was set to 50%, meaning cues did not predict probe location, ensuring that attending to any cue was not strategically beneficial. This design allowed the researchers to measure unintended attentional orienting while participants maintained the semantic meaning of their goal through the picture-response requirement. Results from a repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant interaction between cue category and cue validity. Goal-relevant cues produced a significantly larger cue validity effect than control, goal-related, or control-related cues. Further analysis indicated that this effect was driven by delayed disengagement of attention from goal-relevant cues on invalid trials, rather than faster engagement on valid trials. Goal-related cues did not differ significantly from control conditions, indicating they did not attract attention. These findings provide evidence that goal pursuit involves automatic, unintended attentional biases that are highly selective. Attention is captured by goal-relevant events but not by semantically related, goal-irrelevant events, even when semantic processing is active. This supports accounts of automatic goal pursuit suggesting that goals filter sensory input to prioritize relevant information while shielding against interference from related but irrelevant stimuli. The study demonstrates that this selectivity occurs at early stages of attentional processing, characterized by a difficulty in disengaging from goal-relevant information.

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• attention selective divided