Is attentional capture contingent on top-down control settings or involuntarily driven by salient stimuli? Supporting the stimulus-driven attentional capture view, Schreij, Owens, and Theeuwes (2008) found that an onset distractor caused a response delay, in spite of participants' having adopted an attentional set for a color feature. However, Folk, Remington, and Wu (2009) claimed that this delay reflects separate, nonspatial filtering costs instead, because the onset effects were additive with color-based capture effects, and capture should have caused underadditivity. The present Experiment 1 shows that contingent capture caused by additional color cues is also additive, just like the onset effect. This makes additivity a dubious diagnostic with regard to spatial capture. Experiment 2 demonstrates that it is possible to obtain underadditivity when attention-demanding distractors have sufficient capturing power. Experiment 3 shows that the abrupt onset interference turns into a benefit when the locations of the onset and the target coincide. Together, these results argue in favor of stimulus-driven attentional capture by abrupt onsets. © 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
CITATION STYLE
Schreij, D., Theeuwes, J., & Olivers, C. N. L. (2010). Abrupt onsets capture attention independent of top-down control settings II: Additivity is no evidence for filtering. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 72(3), 672–682. https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.72.3.672
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.