Synergy of stimulus-driven salience and goal-directed prioritization: evidence from the spatial blink.
In the spatial blink paradigm, participants search for a target of a designated color in a rapidly presented stream of letters at fixation. Target identification is typically impaired if a peripheral distractor appears shortly before the target, inducing a spatial blink, but impairment is observed only when the distractor also shares the sought-for color. Such results reveal an important top-down influence on the capture of attention. In the present experiments, we examined the influence of the bottom-up transients associated with the appearance and disappearance of distractors in the spatial blink paradigm. Onsets and offsets alone are incapable of inducing a spatial blink, but we found that the presence of such transients did enhance the effects of target-color-matched distractors. The results reveal important synergistic interactions between top-down and bottom-up factors involved in attentional capture.
Du
Feng
F
Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA. fdu@artsci.wustl.edu
Abrams
Richard A
RA
D001767:Blinking; D002755:Choice Behavior; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception