The roles of feature-specific task set and bottom-up salience in attentional capture: an ERP study.
We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a color-defined target. For target-color singleton cues, behavioral spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cue-induced N2pc components, indicative of attentional capture. These effects were only minimally attenuated for nonsingleton target-color cues, underlining the dominance of top-down task set over salience in attentional capture. Nontarget-color singleton cues triggered no N2pc, but instead an anterior N2 component indicative of top-down inhibition. In Experiment 2, inverted behavioral cueing effects of these cues were accompanied by a delayed N2pc to targets at cued locations, suggesting that perceptually salient but task-irrelevant visual events trigger location-specific inhibition mechanisms that can delay subsequent target selection.
Eimer
Martin
M
School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK. m.eimer@bbk.ac.uk
Kiss
Monika
M
Press
Clare
C
Sauter
Disa
D
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005364:Field Dependence-Independence; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012016:Reference Values; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*