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Salience detection and attentional capture

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Abstract

There is an ongoing debate to what extent irrelevant salient information attracts an observer’s attention and is processed without the observer intending to do so. The present experiment investigated attentional capture of salient but irrelevant objects and compared target processing in target-and-distractor to target-only trials. Both form and color singletons were used and their target–distractor assignment was interchanged. Thus the general impact of the presence of a salient distractor on target processing could be separated from the impact of the specific target–distractor salience relation. Response latencies and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were registered. Results showed a strong influence of the mere presence of an irrelevant distractor on target processing: both the visual N1 and the posterior N2 showed better attention focusing in target-only trials compared to target-and-distractor trials. Response times and N2pc results, on the other hand, showed evidence in favor of salience-specific attention allocation. N2pc results indicated that the distractor affected the allocation of attention in trials with form targets and color distractors but not in the opposite condition. Taken together, results showed a general impact of irrelevant salient singletons on search behavior when they were presented simultaneously with relevant singletons. The allocation of focal attention (as mirrored by the N2pc), however, was also influenced by the specific target–distractor salience relation.

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Notes

  1. As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, it is important to state that the term “salience” may be used in two different ways. Salience may be used to indicate priority in the salience hierarchy, i.e., to denote that an object has priority in the hierarchy of potentially interesting objects or locations. This type of salience may result from the combination of bottom-up feature contrast signal computations with top-down weighting of task-relevant features or dimensions. Second, the term salience may be used to describe the physical distinctiveness of an item or object from other, neighbouring items or objects in the visual field. In this second connotation, salience denotes the result of a pure bottom-up feature contrast computation.

  2. The author would like to thank Jeremy Wolfe for suggesting this RT analysis.

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Acknowledgments

The present research was supported by a research grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG), Research Group 480, TP 5. The author thanks Angela Dinkebach and Agnieszka Wykowska for their help in data collection.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximillian University, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802, Munich, Germany

    Anna Schubö

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  1. Anna Schubö
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Correspondence to Anna Schubö.

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Schubö, A. Salience detection and attentional capture. Psychological Research 73, 233–243 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-008-0215-x

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