Color me impressed: A partner's target feature captures visual attention

Abstract

Attending to a target is more difficult in the presence of a salient distractor. The present study investigated whether social value can modulate the extent to which distractors capture attention. Two participants sitting side-by-side performed a visual search task in cooperative and competitive conditions. Search displays contained either both targets, one target and a neutral stimulus or an ambiguous and a neutral stimulus. Results showed that agents took longer to respond to targets presented together with the partner's target compared to a neutral stimulus of equal salience. Agents also produced more false alarms in response to stimuli whose color lay between their own and the partner's target color compared to stimuli lying between the colors of their target and a neutral stimulus. These results suggest that stimuli with features relevant to a partner can capture attention more than neutral but equally salient stimuli, indicating that social value affects selective attention in a similar way as task goals and selection history.