Stimulus-driven attentional capture: evidence from equiluminant visual objects.
Previous work has shown that abrupt visual onsets capture attention. Possible attention. Possible mechanisms for this phenomenon include (a) a luminance-change detection system and (b) a mechanism that detects the appearance of new perceptual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that attention is captured in visual search by the appearance of a new perceptual object even when the object is equiluminant with its background and thus exhibits no luminance change when it appears. Experiment 3 showed that a highly salient luminance increment alone is not sufficient to capture attention. These findings suggest that attentional capture is mediated by a mechanism that detects the appearance of new perceptual objects.
Yantis
S
S
Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218.
Hillstrom
A P
AP
D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008027:Light; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D015357:Vision Disparity; D014796:Visual Perception