Abstract
In the present study, we investigated in a novel version of the peripheral-cueing paradigm whether object salience influences attentional selection at early stages of visual processing. In each trial, participants searched for targets of one of two possible colors. In the most important condition, the cueing displays consisted of a singleton cue having one target color and three additional nonsingletons of another target color. Hence, all objects in these all-relevant cueing displays had a target color. If singletons initially capture attention in a stimulus-driven way, regular cueing effects (faster responses to targets at the cued location than to targets away from the cue) should be found in these conditions. However, the results suggested otherwise: As compared to a control condition with a singleton cue of a target color among nonsingletons of a nontarget color, the cueing effects in all-relevant cueing displays were strongly reduced. This was also replicated with a very brief cue–target interval. The results suggest top-down contingent capture of attention even during the initial phase of processing salient stimuli, and argue against stimulus-driven capture of attention plus subsequent rapid disengagement.
Highlights
In the present study, we investigated in a novel version of the peripheral-cueing paradigm whether object salience influences attentional selection at early stages of visual processing
We reduced the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between cue and target to 50 ms, to see whether more evidence of capture by top-down matching singleton cues in all-relevant cueing displays could be observed with less time for deallocation
The present study suggests that the attentioncapturing potential of salient singleton cues is no greater than that of nonsingletons when both singleton cues and nonsingletons are presented in top-down matching colors
Summary
We investigated in a novel version of the peripheral-cueing paradigm whether object salience influences attentional selection at early stages of visual processing. If singletons initially capture attention in a stimulus-driven way, regular cueing effects (faster responses to targets at the cued location than to targets away from the cue) should be found in these conditions. The results suggested otherwise: As compared to a control condition with a singleton cue of a target color among nonsingletons of a nontarget color, the cueing effects in all-relevant cueing displays were strongly reduced. This was replicated with a very brief cue–target interval. The reason is that the most salient items in the display would capture attention automatically, and disengagement from or suppression of salient items would be ruled out because the features of the corresponding object would match the search settings
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