Size matters: large objects capture attention in visual search

Can objects or events ever capture one's attention in a purely stimulus-driven manner? A recent review of the literature set out the criteria required to find stimulus-driven attentional capture independent of goal-directed influences, and concluded that no published study has satisfied that cr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2010-12, Vol.5 (12), p.e15293-e15293
Main Author: Proulx, Michael J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attention
Attentional bias
Biology
Criteria
Discrimination (Psychology)
Experiments
Eye Movements
Humans
Literature reviews
Reaction Time
Reproducibility of Results
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Time Factors
Vision, Ocular
Visual Perception
Visual task performance
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Summary:Can objects or events ever capture one's attention in a purely stimulus-driven manner? A recent review of the literature set out the criteria required to find stimulus-driven attentional capture independent of goal-directed influences, and concluded that no published study has satisfied that criteria. Here visual search experiments assessed whether an irrelevantly large object can capture attention. Capture of attention by this static visual feature was found. The results suggest that a large object can indeed capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner and independent of displaywide features of the task that might encourage a goal-directed bias for large items. It is concluded that these results are either consistent with the stimulus-driven criteria published previously or alternatively consistent with a flexible, goal-directed mechanism of saliency detection.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0015293