Attentional capture by abrupt onsets: new perceptual objects or visual masking?
The authors have shown that an object appearing abruptly in a previously blank location is efficiently detected in visual search when it is embedded in an array of objects without abrupt onset (term no-onset stimuli). In these experiments, no-onset stimuli appeared well before the onset stimulus but were camouflaged by additional line segments rendering the stimuli unidentifiable. B. S. Gibson (1996) claims that the availability of the no-onset stimuli was delayed relative to that of the abrupt onset stimulus because of forward masking. The authors show that forward masking is unlikely to be a significant factor in their experiments, and 3 new experiments are reported that undermine Gibson's masking account. Observed differences in the efficiency with which onset and no-onset stimuli are processed in visual search are due to attentional capture by new perceptual objects and to a relatively sluggish process of updating existing object representations.
Yantis
S
S
Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218-2685, USA. yantis@jhu.edu
Jonides
J
J
D001288:Attention; D006801:Humans; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception