Top

Gepubliceerd in:

01-03-2009 | Original Article

Salience detection and attentional capture

Auteur: Anna Schubö

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 2/2009

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.

vorige artikel Attentional and anatomical considerations for the representation of simple stimuli in visual short-term memory: evidence from human electrophysiology

volgende artikel Top-down influences on attentional capture by color changes

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.

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

Bacon, W. F., & Egeth, H. E. (1994). Overriding stimulus-driven attentional capture. Perception & Psychophysics, 55, 485–496.

Cave, K. R. (1999). The FeatureGate model of visual selection. Psychological Research, 62, 182–194.PubMedCrossRef

Eimer, M. (1994). “Sensory gating” as a mechanism for visuospatial orienting: electrophysiological evidence from trial-by-trial cuing experiments. Perception & Psychophysics, 55, 667–675.

Eimer, M. (1996). The N2pc component as an indicator of attentional selectivity. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 99, 225–234.PubMedCrossRef

Folk, C. L., Leber, A. B., & Egeth, H. E. (2002). Made you blink! Contingent attentional capture produces a spatial blink. Perception & Psychophysics, 64, 741–753.

Folk, C. L., & Remington, R. W. (1998). Selectivity in distraction by irrelevant featural singletons: Evidence for two forms of attentional capture. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 24, 847–858.CrossRef

Folk, C. L., & Remington, R. W. (2006). Top-down modulation of preattentive processing: Testing the recovery account of contingent capture. Visual Cognition, 14, 445–465.CrossRef

Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Johnston, J. C. (1992). Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 18, 1030–1044.CrossRef

Geyer, T., Müller, H. J., & Krummenacher, J. (2008). Expectancies modulate attentional capture by salient color singletons. Vision Research, 48, 1315–1326.

Heinze, H. J., Luck, S. J., Mangun, G. R., & Hillyard, S. A. (1990). Visual event-related potentials index focused attention within bilateral stimulus arrays. Evidence for early selection. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 75, 511–527.PubMedCrossRef

Hickey, C., McDonald, J. J., & Theeuwes, J. (2006). Electrophysiological evidence of the capture of visual attention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 604–613.PubMedCrossRef

Hopf, J. M., Boelmans, K., Schoenfeld, M. A., Luck, S. J., & Heinze, H. J. (2004). Attention to features precedes attention to locations in visual search: evidence from electromagnetic brain responses in humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 24, 1822–1832.PubMedCrossRef

Hopf, J. M., Luck, S. J., Girelli, M., Hagner, T., Mangun, G. R., Scheich, H., et al. (2000). Neural sources of focused attention in visual search. Cerebral Cortex, 10, 1233–1241.PubMedCrossRef

Kim, M. S., & Cave, K. R. (1999). Top-down and bottom-up attentional control: On the nature of interference from a salient distractor. Perception & Psychophysics, 61, 1009–1023.

Lamy, D., & Egeth, H. E. (2003). Attentional capture in singleton-detection and feature-search modes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29, 1003–1020.PubMedCrossRef

Leblanc, E., & Jolicoeur, P. (2005). The time course of contingent spatial blink. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 124–131.PubMed

Leblanc, E., Prime, D. J., & Jolicoeur, P. (2008). Tracking the location of visuospatial attention in a contingent capture paradigm. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 657–671.PubMedCrossRef

Luck, S. J., Girelli, M., McDermott, M. T., & Ford, M. A. (1997). Bridging the gap between monkey neurophysiology and human perception: An ambiguity resolution theory of visual selective attention. Cognitive Psychology, 33, 64–87.PubMedCrossRef

Luck, S. J., & Hillyard, S. A. (1994a). Electrophysiological correlates of feature analysis during visual search. Psychophysiology, 31, 291–308.PubMedCrossRef

Luck, S. J., & Hillyard, S. A. (1994b). Spatial filtering during visual search: Evidence from human electrophysiology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 20, 1000–1014.CrossRef

Mangun, G. R. (1995). Neural mechanisms of visual selective attention. Psychophysiology, 32, 4–18.PubMedCrossRef

Müller, H. J., Geyer, T., Zehetleitner, M., & Krummenacher, J. (2008). Attentional capture by salient color singleton distractors is modulated by top-down dimensional set. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance.

Ritter, W., Simson, R., & Vaughan, H. G. (1983). Event-related potential correlates of two stages of information processing in physical and semantic discrimination tasks. Psychophysiology, 20, 168–179.PubMedCrossRef

Schubö, A., Schröger, E., & Meinecke, C. (2004). Texture segmentation and visual search for pop-out targets: an ERP study. Cognitive Brain Research, 21, 317–334.PubMedCrossRef

Schubö, A., Schröger, E., Meinecke, C., & Müller, H. J. (2007a). Attentional resources and pop-out detection in search displays. NeuroReport, 18, 1589–1593.PubMedCrossRef

Schubö, A., Wykowska, A., & Müller, H. J. (2007b). Detecting pop-out targets in contexts of varying homogeneity: Investigating homogeneity coding with event-related brain potentials. Brain Research, 1138, 136–147.PubMedCrossRef

Theeuwes, J. (1991). Cross-dimensional perceptual selectivity. Perception & Psychophysics, 50, 184–193.

Theeuwes, J. (1992). Perceptual selectivity for color and form. Perception & Psychophysics, 51, 599–606.

Theeuwes, J. (1994). Stimulus-driven capture and attentional set: Selective search for color and visual abrupt onsets. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 20, 799–806.CrossRef

Theeuwes, J. (2004). Top-down search strategies cannot override attentional capture. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 65–70.

Theeuwes, J., Atchley, P., & Kramer, A. F. (2000). On the time course of top-down and bottom-up control of visual attention. In S. Monsell & J. Driver (Eds.), Attention & Performance (Vol. 18, pp. 105–125). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Treisman, A. (1988). Features and objects: The Fourteenth Bartlett Memorial Lecture. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40A, 201–237.

Van Zoest, W., & Donk, M. (2004). Bottom-up and top-down control in visual search. Perception, 33, 927–937.PubMedCrossRef

Vogel, E. K., & Luck, S. J. (2000). The visual N1 component as an index of a discrimination process. Psychophysiology, 37, 190–203.PubMedCrossRef

Wolfe, J. M. (1994). Guided Search 2.0: A revised model of visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 1, 202–238.

Woodman, G. F., & Luck, S. J. (1999). Electrophysiological measurement of rapid shifts of attention during visual search. Nature, 400, 867–869.PubMedCrossRef

Woodman, G. F., & Luck, S. J. (2003). Serial deployment of attention during visual search. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 29, 121–138.CrossRef

Titel: Salience detection and attentional capture
Auteur: Anna Schubö
Publicatiedatum: 01-03-2009
Uitgeverij: Springer-Verlag
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 2/2009
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-008-0215-x

Bohn Stafleu van Loghum

Deel dit onderdeel of sectie (kopieer de link)

Abstract

Log in om toegang te krijgen

Andere artikelen Uitgave 2/2009

Independent and additive repetition priming of motion direction and color in visual search

Saccadic eye movement programming: sensory and attentional factors

Dimension- and space-based intertrial effects in visual pop-out search: modulation by task demands for focal-attentional processing

Object-based selection operating on a spatial representation made salient by dimensional segmentation mechanisms: a re-investigation of Egly and Homa (1984)

Attention, competition, and the parietal lobes: insights from Balint’s syndrome

Top-down influences on attentional capture by color changes