Attentional shifts to rare singletons

Autor(en)

Gernot Horstmann, Ulrich Ansorge

Abstrakt

Five experiments examined whether extremely rare featural singletons (e.g., presented in 4% of all trials) capture attention, and whether this effect could be explained by top-down contingent capture or stimulus-driven singleton capture. To this end, performance (accuracy in Experiments 1-4, reaction time in Experiment 5) in a demanding letter search task was measured in singleton trials that were presented within rare-singleton blocks consisting mainly of no-singleton trials, and in singleton trials that occurred in all-singleton blocks. In separate blocks, either target singletons (i.e., a singleton at target position), or distractor singletons (i.e., a singleton at a distractor position) were presented in each trial. Results are consistent with the contingent-capture view. When the letters were presented briefly and accuracy was the dependent variable, a large performance benefit was obtained, revealing that attention was shifted very fast to the singleton. An examination of search efficiency with a variation of set size and reaction time as the dependent variable revealed a strong gain in search efficiency with a rare target singleton. The large benefit was not accompanied by proportionally large costs for distractor singletons relative to the no-distractor trials. Moreover, a comparison of singleton trials from the all-singleton and from the rare-singleton blocks revealed nonspatial costs for the rare singletons that were of about the same size for target and distractor singletons. In summary, results show that an attentional control setting can remain "dormant" for many trials where it is not applicable, but is then applied nearly as efficiently as when the control setting has been used just recently.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Psychologie der Kognition, Emotion und Methoden

Externe Organisation(en)

Universität Bielefeld

Journal

Visual Cognition

Band

14

Seiten

295-325

Anzahl der Seiten

31

ISSN

1350-6285

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13506280500236492

Publikationsdatum

07-2006

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

501006 Experimentalpsychologie, 501011 Kognitionspsychologie

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Cognitive Neuroscience

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/c78119ca-90bc-49dd-b2ed-d47d7e379098