Stimulus-driven attentional capture by equiluminant color change

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the mechanisms underlying stimulus-driven attentional capture by feature changes in basic dimensions, and we chose color for the present investigation. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a target letter among colored disks containing distractor letters while a disk underwent color change. Although color change was irrelevant to the task and uninformative about the target position, we found a strong form of stimulus-driven attentional capture. Experiment 2 demonstrated that salient color discontinuity per se could not capture attention, ruling out the possibility that the capture effect we observed might be due to color discontinuity. In Experiment 3, we observed the capture effect by color change again in a more optimized experimental design. The present findings show that color change captures attention, supporting our view that dynamic feature changes can capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner. Copyright 2005 Psychonomic Society, Inc.