The time course of the contingent spatial blink.
Attentional capture is the unintentional deployment of attention to a task-irrelevant but attentionally salient object. The contingent involuntary orienting hypothesis states that it occurs only if a distractor's property matches current top-down attentional control settings (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992). Folk, Leber, and Egeth (2002) found that monitoring a central RSVP stream for a coloured target led to spatial attentional capture by a peripheral distractor that matched the target colour. Using a similar paradigm, we explored the time course of this spatial blink. Implications of this study for current accounts of the attentional capture phenomenon are discussed.
Leblanc
Emilie
E
Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Québec. emilie.leblanc-langlois@umontreal.ca
Jolicoeur
Pierre
P
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001767:Blinking / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors