Moving and looming stimuli capture attention.
Attention capture is often operationally defined as speeded search performance when an otherwise nonpredictive stimulus happens to be the target of a visual search. That is, if a stimulus captures attention, it should be searched with priority even when it is irrelevant to the task. Given this definition, only the abrupt appearance of a new object (see, e.g., Jonides & Yantis, 1988) and one type of luminance contrast change (Enns, Austen, Di Lollo, Rauschenberger, & Yantis, 2001) have been shown to strongly capture attention. We show that translating and looming stimuli also capture attention. This phenomenon does not occur for all dynamic events: We also show that receding stimuli do not attract attention. Although the sorts of dynamic events that capture attention do not fit neatly into a single category, we speculate that stimuli that signal potentially behaviorally urgent events are more likely to receive attentional priority.
Franconeri
Steven L
SL
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. francon@wjh.harvard.edu
Simons
Daniel J
DJ
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010466:Perceptual Closure; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012858:Size Perception