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The time course of intended and unintended allocation of attention

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Abstract

According to the contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis, only stimuli that match the attentional control settings based on intentions capture attention. In contrast, the surprise-capture hypothesis states that expectancy-discrepant stimuli can capture attention even if they do not match the control settings, implying unintended capture. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether unintended and intended attentional shifts are characterized by different time courses, indicating different underlying mechanisms. An unintended attentional shift was tested by the first, unannounced presentation of a color singleton at the location of a visual search target, and intended shifts by the following repeated presentations of a predictive singleton. Differences in time course were revealed by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between singleton and target. Results showed that accuracy with expected singletons was barely affected by SOA, whereas SOA strongly affected accuracy with the unexpected singleton. The results are interpreted as supporting the surprise-capture hypothesis. It is furthermore argued that a division of labor between contingent capture and surprise in the control of attention supports adaptive behavior.

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Notes

  1. Actually, Wilcocks (1928), following a hypothesis by Selz (1922), conducted the first experiments using unexpected singletons, but he did not use a visual search task in the strictest sense.

  2. It should be emphasized that it is not supposed that the attentional shift is caused by the feeling of surprise. Instead, surprise is conceived of as a syndrome of responses to unexpected (schema-discrepant) events, with one of the components of this syndrome being the attentional shift.

  3. To what extent this is possible remains to be examined. A good guess, however, appears to be that only basic features, but not their conjunctions, capture attention in the way examined in the present experiments (cf. Treisman & Gelade, 1980).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (ME 708/4–1) to Wulf-Uwe Meyer. I am indebted to Sabine Dlugosch for conducting the experiments, to Lily-Maria Silny for her technical assistance in manuscript preparation, and to Elena Carbone, Asher Cohen, Manfred Heumann, Wulf-Uwe Meyer, Ingrid Scharlau, Jan Theeuwes, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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  1. Fakultät für Psychologie und Sportwissenschaft, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 100 131, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany

    Gernot Horstmann

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Horstmann, G. The time course of intended and unintended allocation of attention. Psychological Research 70, 13–25 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-004-0184-7

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