title: Stimulus-driven capture and attentional set: selective search for color and visual abrupt onsets.
abstract: Recent evidence suggests that attentional capture is contingent on the attentional control setting induced by the task demands (C. L. Folk, R. Remington, & J. C. Johnston, 1992). Because the experiments on which these conclusions are based can be criticized for several reasons, the contingent capture hypothesis was tested using 2 visual search tasks in which subjects searched multielement displays in which a color singleton and onset singleton were simultaneously present. Both experiments show that the contingent capture hypothesis does not hold: Irrespective of attentional set, attention was captured by the most salient singleton. The findings suggest a stimulus-driven model of performance in which selection is basically determined by the properties of the featural singletons present in the visual field.
authors.affiliation: TNO Human Factors Research Institute, Soesterberg, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Theeuwes
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D006801:Humans; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time