Contingent capture of involuntary visual attention interferes with detection of auditory stimuli.

Marc R Kamke,Jill Harris

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00528

Abstract

The involuntary capture of attention by salient visual stimuli can be influenced by the behavioral goals of an observer. For example, when searching for a target item, irrelevant items that possess the target-defining characteristic capture attention more strongly than items not possessing that feature. Such contingent capture involves a shift of spatial attention toward the item with the target-defining characteristic. It is not clear, however, if the associated decrements in performance for detecting the target item are entirely due to involuntary orienting of spatial attention. To investigate whether contingent capture also involves a non-spatial interference, adult observers were presented with streams of visual and auditory stimuli and were tasked with simultaneously monitoring for targets in each modality. Visual and auditory targets could be preceded by a lateralized visual distractor that either did, or did not, possess the target-defining feature (a specific color). In agreement with the contingent capture hypothesis, target-colored distractors interfered with visual detection performance (response time and accuracy) more than distractors that did not possess the target color. Importantly, the same pattern of results was obtained for the auditory task: visual target-colored distractors interfered with sound detection. The decrement in auditory performance following a target-colored distractor suggests that contingent capture involves a source of processing interference in addition to that caused by a spatial shift of attention. Specifically, we argue that distractors possessing the target-defining characteristic enter a capacity-limited, serial stage of neural processing, which delays detection of subsequently presented stimuli regardless of the sensory modality.

Highlights

It is commonly held that the human brain is equipped with selection mechanisms that filter and prioritize incoming sensory signals
There is a wealth of evidence showing that the extent to which visual events involuntarily capture attention depends on the goals of an observer
Behavioral performance in the visual detection task was negatively impacted by distractors that possessed the target-defining characteristic compared to other distractors

Summary

Introduction

It is commonly held that the human brain is equipped with selection mechanisms that filter and prioritize incoming sensory signals. These mechanisms can be captured involuntarily by highly salient events in the environment, or directed voluntarily according to goals or task demands (for review, see Yantis, 2000). Converging evidence suggests that such contingent capture involves a shift of spatial attention toward the item containing the target-defining feature, but it is not clear if the associated decrements in performance for detecting a target item are entirely due to involuntary orienting of spatial attention. We address this question by determining whether the detection of auditory events is hindered during contingent capture of visual spatial attention

Methods

Results

Conclusion