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Contingent capture in cueing: the role of color search templates and cue-target color relations

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Abstract

Visual search studies have shown that attention can be top-down biased to a specific target color, so that only items with this color or a similar color can capture attention. According to some theories of attention, colors from different categories (i.e., red, green, blue, yellow) are represented independently. However, other accounts have proposed that these are related—either because color is filtered through broad overlapping channels (4-channel view), or because colors are represented in one continuous feature space (e.g., CIE space) and search is governed by specific principles (e.g., linear separability between colors, or top-down tuning to relative colors). The present study tested these different views using a cueing experiment in which observers had to select one target color (e.g., red) and ignore two or four differently colored distractors that were presented prior to the target (cues). The results showed clear evidence for top-down contingent capture by colors, as a target-colored cue captured attention more strongly than differently colored cues. However, the results failed to support any of the proposed views that different color categories are related to one another by overlapping channels, linear separability, or relational guidance (N = 96).

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Acknowledgments

Supported by project number CS11-009 of the WWTF (Wiener Wissenschafts- und Technologiefonds) to Ulrich Ansorge, Otmar Scherzer, and Shelley Buchinger, and an ARC (Australian Research Council) Discovery Grant DP110100588 awarded to Stefanie I. Becker.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Psychology, Universität Wien, Liebiggasse 5, 1010, Wien, Austria

    Ulrich Ansorge

  2. Institute of Cognitive Science, Universität Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany

    Ulrich Ansorge

  3. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Stefanie I. Becker

Authors
  1. Ulrich Ansorge
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  2. Stefanie I. Becker
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Correspondence to Ulrich Ansorge.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 1.

Table 1 Results of mixed-model ANOVAs of the meas corret reaction times (RTs) and of the error rates (ERs) as a function of the within-participant variables cue-target positions (SP vs. DP), block (2CC vs. 4CC) and cue-target color similarity (target-similar vs. target-different), and the between-participants variables target color (red, yellow, green, or blue) and dissimilar cue color in the 2CC block (red, yellow, green, or blue)
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Ansorge, U., Becker, S.I. Contingent capture in cueing: the role of color search templates and cue-target color relations. Psychological Research 78, 209–221 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0497-5

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