Contingent Attentional Capture by Conceptually Relevant Images

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2013-06, Vol.39 (3), p.861-871
Main Authors: Wyble, Brad, Folk, Charles, Potter, Mary C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity levels. Psychomotricity
Adolescent
Adult
Animals
Attention
Attention - physiology
Attentional Capture
Biological and medical sciences
Classification
Coding
Color
Concept Formation - physiology
Conceptual Imagery
Distractors
Fixation
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Information
Meaning
Motion
Orientation
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Pennsylvania
Perception
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Sensory perception
Space Perception - physiology
Spatial Ability
Sports equipment
Stimuli
Time
Time course
Time Factors
Vigilance. Attention. Sleep
Vision
Visual Perception
Visualization
Young Adult
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Summary:Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined attentional-control settings of the viewer. Contingent capture has been demonstrated for low-level features, such as color, motion, and orientation. In the present paper we show that contingent capture can also occur for conceptual information at the superordinate level (e.g., sports equipment, marine animal, dessert food). This effect occurs rapidly (i.e., within 200 ms), is a spatial form of attention, and is contingent on attentional-control settings that change on each trial, suggesting that natural images can be decoded into their conceptual meaning to drive shifts of attention within the time course of a single fixation.
ISSN:0096-1523
1939-1277
DOI:10.1037/a0030517