Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewAttentional capture and inattentional blindness
Section snippets
Implicit measures of attentional capture
Most recent studies of attentional capture have adapted methodologies used extensively in the study of visual search. Four distinct paradigms have been used to explore implicit attentional capture by measuring the effects of an irrelevant stimulus on performance of a primary task (see Table 1).
The logic underlying the ‘Additional Singleton’ task is the most intuitive of these paradigms: subjects perform a visual search task, and one item in the search display has a unique, distinctive feature
Explicit attentional capture (inattentional blindness)
Although we might intuitively believe that unusual, unexpected and salient objects will capture attention, leading to awareness, they often do not. Perhaps you have had an automobile accident and the other driver claimed he did not see you even though you were right in front of him. Of course, the driver’s performance might have been affected if your car implicitly captured attention, but that would do little to resolve the question of why he did not see you and it probably could not have
Conclusions
In the static IB paradigm, observers often fail to notice the onset of a new, unexpected object in the display. In some respects, this finding is consistent with findings from the Irrelevant Feature Search paradigm showing that when attention is focused on some other part of a display, an abrupt onset might not implicitly capture attention42. Implicit attentional capture in the Irrelevant Feature Search paradigm requires that attention must not be focused elsewhere. The static IB results are
Outstanding questions
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Is the lack of explicit attentional capture specific to vision? Visual attention can focus exclusively on a single object or location, but perhaps auditory attention is less focused. If so, we might not need an attentional set to detect auditorily relevant stimuli. Real-world attentional capture often occurs in modalities other than vision, hence, studies of ‘inattentional deafness’ and attentional capture might be important.
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Are there any cases in which explicit attentional capture consistently
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Christopher Chabris, Steve Most, Rebecca Reimer, Brian Scholl, and Steve Yantis for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The writing of this manuscript was supported in part by NSF grant no. BCS-9905578 and by a Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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