Determining whether attentional control settings are inclusive or exclusive

The aim of the present study was to determine whether attentional control settings operate with an inclusive rule (orient attention to stimuli that share a task-relevant feature with the target) or an exclusive rule (do not orient attention to stimuli that do not share a task-relevant feature with the target). All three experiments used a variation of the Folk and Remington (e.g., Folk, Remington, & Johnston, 1992) paradigm. In Experiment 1, cuing effects were found for combination cues (cues containing an onset feature and a color feature) with both onset and color targets. Experiment 2, using a delay between cue and target, revealed inhibition of return (IOR) for combination cues with onset and color targets. Unexpectedly, IOR was also found for onset cues with color targets, and this finding was confirmed in Experiment 3. These findings indicate that attentional control settings use an inclusive rule. Moreover, the presence of IOR with onset cues and color targets suggests that onset cues may automatically capture attention, but attention control settings allow for rapid disengagement when the onset cue does not contain a task-relevant feature.

[1]  Charles L. Folk,et al.  Can new objects override attentional control settings? , 1999, Perception & psychophysics.

[2]  R W Remington,et al.  The structure of attentional control: contingent attentional capture by apparent motion, abrupt onset, and color. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[3]  J. Theeuwes,et al.  On the time course of top-down and bottom-up control of visual attention , 2000 .

[4]  R. Klein,et al.  Inhibition of return to color: A replication and nonextension of Law, Pratt, and Abrams (1995) , 1998, Perception & psychophysics.

[5]  Charles L. Folk,et al.  Contingent attentional capture or delayed allocation of attention? , 2001, Perception & psychophysics.

[6]  B. Gibson,et al.  Inhibition of return and attentional control settings , 2000, Perception & psychophysics.

[7]  J. C. Johnston,et al.  Involuntary covert orienting is contingent on attentional control settings. , 1992, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[8]  P. Maruff,et al.  Facilitation and inhibition arising from the exogenous orienting of covert attention depends on the temporal properties of spatial cues and targets , 1999, Neuropsychologia.

[9]  R. Remington,et al.  Selectivity in distraction by irrelevant featural singletons: evidence for two forms of attentional capture. , 1998, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[10]  James M. Hillis,et al.  The effect of the physical characteristics of cues and targets on facilitation and inhibition , 2001, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[11]  R A Abrams,et al.  Inhibition of return in discrimination tasks. , 1999, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[12]  S. Yantis,et al.  Abrupt visual onsets and selective attention: Evidence from visual search. , 1984 .

[13]  L. Chelazzi,et al.  Do peripheral non-informative cues induce early facilitation of target detection? , 1994, Vision Research.

[14]  J. Wolfe,et al.  Second-order parallel processing: visual search for the odd item in a subset. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[15]  J. Pratt,et al.  Oculocentric coding of inhibited eye movements to recently attended locations. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[16]  B. Milliken,et al.  Inhibition of return and the attentional set for integrating versus differentiating information. , 1999, The Journal of general psychology.

[17]  S. Yantis,et al.  Stimulus-driven attentional capture: evidence from equiluminant visual objects. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[18]  J. Pratt,et al.  Inhibition of return is composed of attentional and oculomotor processes , 1999, Perception & psychophysics.

[19]  R. Klein,et al.  Inhibition of return , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[20]  S. Tipper,et al.  On the Strategic Modulation of the Time Course of Facilitation and Inhibition of Return , 2001, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[21]  G. Logan,et al.  Converging operations in the study of visual selective attention , 1996 .

[22]  J. Theeuwes.  Stimulus-driven capture and attentional set: selective search for color and visual abrupt onsets. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[23]  S. Yantis,et al.  Abrupt visual onsets and selective attention: voluntary versus automatic allocation. , 1990, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[24]  Charles L. Folk,et al.  9. When knowledge does not help: limitations on the flexibility of attentional control , 1996 .

[25]  R. Klein,et al.  Visual and motor effects in inhibition of return. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[26]  J. Theeuwes.  Perceptual selectivity for color and form , 1992, Perception & psychophysics.

[27]  J. Pratt,et al.  The role of attentional set on attentional cueing and inhibition of return , 2001 .

[28]  M. Posner,et al.  Components of visual orienting , 1984 .

[29]  A. Samuel,et al.  Inhibition of return: A graphical meta-analysis of its time course and an empirical test of its temporal and spatial properties , 2003, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[30]  G. Tassinari,et al.  Sensory and attentional components of slowing of manual reaction time to non-fixated visual targets by ipsilateral primes , 1993, Vision Research.

[31]  J. Pratt,et al.  Inhibition of return in location- and identity-based choice decision tasks , 1997, Perception & psychophysics.

[32]  A. Sereno,et al.  Inhibition of return in manual and saccadic response systems , 2000, Perception & psychophysics.