title: Unexpected abrupt onsets can override a top-down set for color.
abstract: A substantial literature supports the contention that the involuntary allocation of spatial attention to salient stimuli is contingent on the top-down goals of the observer. However, recent studies suggest that stimuli that violate expectations built up through experience can override top-down set, resulting in cognitively impenetrable, involuntary shifts of spatial attention. The present studies provide a strong test of this hypothesis by manipulating the frequency of presentation of salient, irrelevant, stimuli in spatial cuing and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigms. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 found that for targets defined by color, infrequent, uninformative onset precues produce evidence of capture, but that for targets defined by onset, infrequent color singleton precues do not. Experiment 4 provides strong converging evidence for the ability of infrequent onsets to override a top-down set for color; when monitoring an RSVP stream for a colored target, an infrequent onset in the periphery produced a decrement in target report indicative of attentional capture. Together, the results suggest that infrequent onsets represent a special class of stimuli that can produce involuntary shifts of spatial attention that are cognitively impenetrable.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology.
authors.forename: Charles L
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Folk
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of Queensland.
authors.forename: Roger W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Remington
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult